"It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own."
— Harry S. Truman

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
— Richard P. Feynman

"No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity."
— Rush Limbaugh

"When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters."
— Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America, Volume 2)

"You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place."
— Bruce Sterling

"Do not tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value."
— Joe Biden

"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. "
— Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations)

"On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead."
— Joel Salatin (Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal)

"Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos."
— Thomas Sowell

"Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things."
— Philip Slater

"The power to tax is the power to destroy."
— John Marshall

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those
who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the
government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good for."
— Cintra Wilson (Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny)

"John McCain’s plan to balance the budget by 2013 may have just taken the prize for Most Ridicule Sustained in a 24-Hour Period. (Before that, McCain's and Clinton’s gas-tax holiday proposals held the title.) The biggest gripe: It’s hard to see how McCain would sustain the Bush tax cuts, which the CBO estimates would create a $443 billion deficit by 2013, and still find room for his estimated $300 billion in additional tax proposals while also eliminating the deficit."
— Christopher Beam

"Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste."
— G.K. Chesterton (What's Wrong with the World)

"Hinter der Kritik am müßigen Leben und der Rechtfertigung unablässigen Geschäftigseins stehen Auffassungen, die nicht länger ausgesprochen werden müssen, so offenkundig erscheinen sie: dass jedermann auf Erden der einen oder anderen Nation angehören und innerhalb der einen oder anderen Volkswirtschaft tätig sein müsse; dass diese Volkswirtschaften miteinander im Wettbewerb stehen."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate. "
— Ann Druyan

"Das Bild vom Wirtschaftsgeschehen als einem Wettlauf oder Wettkampf ist in seinen Details etwas verschwommen, doch es scheint, als hätte es als Wettlauf kein Ziel und deshalb kein natürliches Ende. Das einzige Ziel des Wettläufers ist es, die Führung zu übernehmen und zu behalten. Die Frage, warum das Leben wie ein Wettlauf sein muss oder warum die Volkswirtschaften einen Wettlauf gegeneinander veranstalten müssen, statt kameradschaftlich der Gesundheit zuliebe miteinander zu joggen, wird nicht gestellt. Ein Wettlauf, ein Wettkampf - so ist es eben. Wir gehören von Natur aus zu verschiedenen Nationen; von Natur aus stehen Nationen in Konkurrenz zu anderen Nationen. Wir sind, wie uns die Natur geschaffen hat. Die Welt ist ein Dschungel [...], und im Dschungel konkurrieren alle Arten mit allen anderen Arten um Raum und Nahrung."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"Konkurrenz ist eine Sublimierung von Krieg."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"Für wahre Marktgläubige macht es keinen Sinn, wenn du sagst, dass es dir kein Vergnügen macht, dich in einen Wettbewerb mit deinen Mitmenschen zu begeben, und dass du dich lieber zurückziehen möchtest. Du kannst dich ja zurückziehen, wenn du möchtest, sagen sie, aber deine Konkurrenten werden es ganz gewiss nicht tun. Sobald du deine Waffen niederlegst, wirst du abgeschlachtet. Wir sind unausweichlich gefangen in einem Krieg aller gegen alle."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature."
— Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded)

"[I]m Internet [ist] Aufmerksamkeit eine echte Ware geworden, die sich bereits im Moment ihrer Entstehung vermarkten lässt."
— Sascha Lobo (Wir nennen es Arbeit)

"[V]orrangiges Ziel [der Unternehmen] ist nicht in erster Linie Effizienz, sondern Kontrolle."
— Sascha Lobo (Wir nennen es Arbeit)

"People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer."
— Michael Shermer

"Makati shows the Philippines the way it wants to be but Quiapo shows the Philippines the way it really is."
— Carlos Celdran

"[W]enn der Austausch [Handel] nicht in Liebe und freundlicher Gerechtigkeit stattfindet, wird er bloß einige zur Gier und andere zum Hunger führen."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution."
— Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)

"For the sake of “job creation,” in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)"
— Wendell Berry

"For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Economy and environment are the same thing. That is the rule of nature."
— Mollie Beattie

"But such people (Moderate Conservatives) aren't liberal. What they are is corporate. Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of 'change,' punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock'n'roll musuems, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist fro the Grateful Dead hail the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Coversvatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture's usual priority - profit."
— Thomas Frank

"The worst thing that could happen to any economy is the loss of confidence"
— Med Yones