Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.

Deflation isn’t good, and inflation is easier to cure than deflation.

Socialists tend to want to pay people more money to do less work, and capitalists tend to want to provide better products at better prices.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

In the simplest terms, inflation occurs when there’s too much money in the system. On the flip side, deflation occurs when there are too few dollars in circulation.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.

I’m interested in movement, and I’m interested in money, and I’m interested in the movement of money.

Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

I know the Federal Reserve Bank can continue to print more and more money… but city and state governments cannot.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

During the Enron debacle, it was workers who took the pounding, not bankers. Not only did Enron employees lose their jobs, many lost their retirement savings. That’s because they were at the bottom of the investing food chain.

People concerned about inflation today tend to buy big houses and nice cars.

No one saw the recession coming.

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

The real minimum wage is zero.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.

I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.

The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment… the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

We’re still in a recession. We’re not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting ‚the rich‘ to pay ‚their fair share‘ is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

The nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

I have spoken about inflation, unemployment, farmers‘ problems, security, etc. I keep talking about these issues. I seek answers from the Indian government.

The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital – in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples‘ money.

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.