...theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
-- Milton Friedman and many others
"The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did" (FT, 06/07/03)
-- Milton Friedman
"In my original support for a straight money target, I always emphasized that it was partly a case based on ignorance, based on the fact that we really did not understand sufficiently well the detailed relationship between money, income, interest rates, and the like to be able to fine-tune, that our goal should be to develop a detailed enough understanding so that we could do better than a simple constant monetary growth target.
However, I believe still, as I did then, that constant monetary growth would produce a highly satisfactory price path, and, if it enabled you to get rid of the Federal Reserve System, that gain would compensate for sacrificing the further improvement that a more sophisticated rule could produce."
-- Milton Friedman, email to Edward Nelson (assistant vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), July 21, 2003
"... difference between me and people like Murray Rothbard is that, though I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction."
-- Milton Friedman, 1995 interview in Reason magazine
"A nation's exchange rate is the single most important price in its economy; it will influence the entire range of individual prices, imports and exports, and even the level of economic activity. So it is hard for any government to ignore large swings in its exchange rate..."
-- Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten, "Changing Fortunes: The World's Money and the Threat to American Leadership", page 232
"Having fallen from the eternal, the Evil One's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys."
-- Denis de Rougemont
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
-- Ephesians 6:12
"Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good."
-- Buddha
"And the British political economist Fred Hirsch generalized the point: once a social system, such as capitalism, convinces everyone that it can dispense with morality and public spirit, the universal pursuit of self-interest being all that is needed for satisfactory performance, the system will undermine its own viability, which is in fact premised on civic behaviour and on the respect of certain moral norms to a far greater extent than capitalism’s official ideology avows."
-- Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays, pg 156
"The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
"The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
-- Alvin Toffler
"Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life."
-- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
-- Charles Darwin
"Only fraud and falsehood dread examination. Truth invites it."
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson
"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
-- Marshall McLuhan
"It’s not WHAT backs our money, it’s WHO controls the QUANTITY."
-- Bill Still
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Open Wiki
New Quote
