Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.

Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.

'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'

A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'

American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, 'What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn't done anything for us; we're going to whoop it up now,' that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.

Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise.

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.

Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.

I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.'

I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.

I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.

In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important.

In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.

It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.

Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks.

Milton Friedman. Friedman had a solid MV = PQ doctrine from which he deviated very little all his life. By the way, he's about as smart a guy as you'll meet. He's as persuasive as you hope not to meet.

My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.

Rent control created deadweight loss.

The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.

The Malthusian Theory - that mankind, for biological and sociological reasons, is so fertile, so fecund, that if you started out with the new continent and plenty of land for everybody, in several generations we would multiply our numbers.

The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.

The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can't give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we're constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most.

Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government.