Quotes from Paul Samuelson

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

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.'

Man does not live by GNP alone.

You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

The consumer, so it is said, is the king each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.

Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.

The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don't waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that.

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.

What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?'

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

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

You're not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no 'it' to take. It's one or the other.

Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.

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.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.

My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.

I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.

We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter 'H' that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling.

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?'