35 Economy-Related Quotes

In the ever-evolving landscape of global finance and commerce, the economy shapes nearly every aspect of our lives. From our personal finance decisions to the vast complexities of international trade, understanding economic principles can provide valuable insights and foresight. To illuminate these concepts, we've assembled a handpicked collection of the top 35 economy-related quotes. These words of wisdom come from some of history's greatest thinkers, economists, and leaders. Whether you're a seasoned analyst or simply interested in the dynamics of economics, these compelling quotes will offer both inspiration and a deeper understanding of the forces that drive our world. Join us as we dive into a world where words meet wealth, and phrases forge financial insight.

1. “Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” - Joe Biden

2. “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.” - Harry S. Truman

3. “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

4. “[V]orrangiges Ziel [der Unternehmen] ist nicht in erster Linie Effizienz, sondern Kontrolle.” - Sascha Lobo

5. “Economy and environment are the same thing. That is the rule of nature.” - Mollie Beattie

6. “The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.” - Ivan Illich

7. “The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.” - George Monbiot

8. “How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?” - John Maynard Keynes

9. “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

10. “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.'This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. (From "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")” - Wendell Berry

11. “In economy, invisible hand is a set of wealthy men.It's the puppeteer who's in charge behind the curtain.” - Toba Beta

12. “They're so broke that they've actually cut essential services. In many places, they've cut policemen, because, who the fuck needs them? Or firemen, son of a bitch, it's much more fun watching something burn down.” - Lewis Black

13. “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

14. “THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.” - Jonathan Franzen

15. “Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.” - Courtney Milan

16. “...lo económico por necesidad toma lugar en el tiempo, es decir, es temporal. Dicho de otro modo, los hechos o datos o acontecimientos que el economísta utiliza para sus fines ocurren todos en el tiempo, en el tiempo histórico. No hay, en efecto, diferencias de naturaleza entre el carácter temporal de un evento que sucedió hace veinticuatro horas y uno que sucedió hace dos siglos. Ambos son perfectamente fait accompli. Queda, desde luego, la actitud que suele provocar -en no pocos- el tiempo más contemporáneo, de discutir los hechos y sus consecuencias como si no estuvieran ya consumados, y sólo porque se tiene información acerca de las opciones que estaban abiertas y que no se adoptaron.” - Asdrubal Baptista

17. “I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.”“How would you introduce her?” I asked.“I’m just going to say her name,” he said.” - Daniel Amory

18. “When I opened the last [401k] statement, I jumped out of the window. True, it was the kitchen window and I only fell two feet, so the whole scene lacked drama, but I thought that was the required reaction to extreme financial turmoil in America. And I am nothing if not patriotic.” - Celia Rivenbark

19. “Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem—unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and ani­mals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.” - David Graeber

20. “Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.” - Victor Hugo

21. “Cuando el Estado se hace dueño de la principal riqueza de un país, corresponde preguntarse quién es el dueño del Estado.” - Eduardo Galeano

22. “It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.” - Wendell Berry

23. “With the breakdown of money economy the practice of international barter is becoming prevalent.” - John Maynard Keynes

24. “Many historians regard him [Offa] as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before Alfred the Great. In the 780s he extended his power over most of Southern England. One of the most remarkable extantfrom King Offa's reign is a gold coin that is kept in the British Museum. On one side, it carries the inscription Offa Rex (Offa the King). But, turn it over and you are in for a surprise, for in badly copied Arabic are the words La Illaha Illa Allah ('There is no god but Allah alone'). This coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinarfrom the reign of Al-Mansur, dating to 773, and was most probably used by Anglo-Saxon traders. It would have been known even in Anglo-Saxon England that Islamic gold dinars were the most important coinage in the world at that time and Offa's coin looked enough like the original that it would have been readily accepted abroad.” - Jim Al-Khalili

25. “Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.” - Ha-Joon Chang

26. “What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.“I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”“You know why that is?”“Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.“Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.” - Melina Marchetta

27. “Luxury as beauty" has nothing to do with a particular place or an object's price tag. It is seeing with eyes for beauty. Once we cut the automatic but learned connection between buying stuff and pleasure, we can actively cultivate new connections - a sense of freedom as we shed draining habits and discover new pleasures in seeing and creating beauty all around us.” - Frances Moore Lappé

28. “We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

29. “E eu pergunto aos economistas políticos, aos moralistas, se já calcularam o número de indivíduos que é forçoso condenar à miséria, ao trabalho desproporcionado, à desmoralização, à infâmia, à ignorância crapulosa, à desgraça invencível, à penúria absoluta, para produzir um rico?” - Almeida Garrett

30. “Nothing is illegal so long as you correct it before the SEC catches it.” - Ali Sheikh

31. “You know what—gyms make the largest chunk of their profit from clients who pay their monthly dues on auto-pay but never bother to show up and use the gym. The DVD-rental companies make a good chunk of their profits from late fees; the credit-card companies make a fortune on sundry fines and penalties; the airlines’ margins are highest on ticket changes and cancellations… So, the key to running a successful business in America is to sign up a customer and pray he’ll somehow screw up…” - Ali Sheikh

32. “When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.” - Steve Maraboli

33. “The relationship between any two communities in the global economy is not unlike a marriage. As couples counselors advise, relationships falter when two partners are too interdependent. When any stress affecting one partner - the loss of a job, an illness, a bad-hair day - brings down the other, the couple suffers. A much healthier relationship is grounded in the relative strength of each partner, who each should have his or her own interests, hobbies, friends, and professional identity, so that when anything goes wrong, the couple can support one another from a position of strength. Our ability to love, like our ability to produce, must be grounded in our own security. And our economy, like our love, when it comes from a place of community, can grow without limit.” - Michael H. Shuman

34. “Products produced cheaply create ugly work lives and ugly households and ugly communities. Profits produced quickly cannot purchase patience and care. Patience is beautiful. Restraint and care are beautiful. Peace is beautiful. A small, diversified organic farm is beautiful.” - Woody Tasch

35. “Self-preservation—this is your new focus. The only obligation of today is to preserve the breath of tomorrow. Then, once footing is regained, you can begin to fulfill debt obligations. Debt is hindsight.” - John-Talmage Mathis