These political economy quotes will inspire you. Political economy is the study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom, and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging political economy quotes, political economy sayings, and political economy proverbs.
Best Political Economy Quotes
- “Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” ~ David Rockefeller
- “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.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
- “There are no doubts that, the situation in the country today, indicates that there is much more work to do in the process of reforming the political economy and improving the quality of life of our people and communities.” ~ Ibrahim Babangida
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“It’s called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.” ~ Stephen Leacock
- “As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed.” ~ Paul Virilio
- “The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.” ~ Thomas Malthus
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“Self-preservation and self-denial: the basis of all political economy.” ~ Lord Acton
- “He who attempts to draw any conclusion whatever as to the nation’s wealth or poverty from the mere fact of a favorable or unfavorable Balance of Trade, has not grasped the first fundamental principle of Political Economy.” ~ Ernst Engel
- “Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.” ~ Friedrich Engels
- “The parallel existence and mutual interaction of “state” and “market” in the modern world create “political economy”; without both state and market there could be no political economy.” ~ Robert Gilpin
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“Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “Bourgeois political economy … never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘science of people’ but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.” ~ Herbert Marcuse
- “The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion” ~ Henry George
- “The prevailing ideology of the modern west – which is political economy – is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.” ~ James Buchan
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“Political economy has only become a science since it has been confined to the results of inductive investigation.” ~ Jean-Baptiste Say
- “Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?” ~ Gustave de Molinari
- “Quite apart from our desire to avoid destroying the planet or economic meltdown, I offer another reason to position cooperation at the heart of our political economy: it will mean we are more likely to live sane, fruitful lives” ~ Oliver James
- “The free-trade idea, logically applied, will abolish usury; and with usury will disappear the chief bone of contention between labor and capital. But, just at this point, free-traders go over to the enemy; and many writers on political economy, in flat contradiction of the essential principles of that science, have made elaborate arguments to prove self-government in finance, impossible! What shall we think of men who, having dethroned kings, demolished popes, destroyed slave oligarchies and assailed tariff monopoly, advise submission to the most oppressive and dishonest of despotisms, Usury?” ~ Ezra Heywood
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“I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes.” ~ Robert Peel
- “Scholars have endlessly written about antebellum Protestant thinking about slavery. Now, finally, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon turns a spotlight on a new, crucial question: how did antebellum Protestants parse capitalism? For anyone who seeks to understand the political economy of the antebellum era-or, indeed, the complex entanglement of Christianity and capitalism today-this book is critical. I, for one, am very grateful to Stewart Davenport for having written it.” ~ Lauren F. Winner
- “Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.” ~ Karl Marx
- “Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.” ~ John Stuart Mill
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“Don’t make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.” ~ Leland Stanford
- “There are a multitude of allied branches of knowledge connected with mans condition; the relation of these to political economy is analogous to the connexion of mechanics, astronomy, optics, sound, heat, and every other branch more or less of physical science, with pure mathematics.” ~ William Stanley Jevons
- “We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.” ~ Nassau William Senior
- “There is no part of the administration of government that requires extensive information and a thorough knowledge of the principles of political economy, so much as the business of taxation. The man who understands those principles best will be least likely to resort to oppressive expedients, or sacrifice any particular class of citizens to the procurement of revenue. It might be demonstrated that the most productive system of finance will always be the least burdensome.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
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“It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy – government has no such office.” ~ Walt Whitman
- “From my earliest acquaintance with the science of political economy, it has been evident to my mind that capital was the product of labor, and that therefore, in its best analysis there could be no natural conflict between capital and labor.” ~ Leland Stanford
- “As an element in human progress, the right of private property, in importance, has taken first and almost only place in the current systems of law and of political economy. While admitting its great importance, we cannot conceal the fact that the writers on those subjects have wholly failed to distinguish between its use and its abuse, or to recognize its rational and equitable limits.” ~ Joshua K. Ingalls
- “persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science…
Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy” ~ Thomas Carlyle -
“Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” ~ Alfred Marshall
- “Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “I am interested in the political economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question is one of “reconstructive” communities as a cultural, as well as a political, fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger system – given the power and cultural relationships – can move toward managing the connections between the developing communities. There are many, many hard questions here – including, obviously, ones related to ecological sustainability and climate change.” ~ Gar Alperovitz
- “Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“The National Debt is a very Good Thing and it would be dangerous to pay it off for fear of Political Economy.” ~ W. C. Sellar
- “[Louis] Brandeis had a very distinctive vision of political economy that he persuaded Woodrow Wilson to adopt in the 1912 election and that he largely enacted from the bench.” ~ Jeffrey Rosen
- “And again, the political economy in that particular environment means that, if my attraction ever coheres as a thought at all, it’s never going to be verbalized, because that will mess up the education environment, it will mess up everything. You cannot claim to be doing good if you’re moving in that direction.” ~ Anne Elizabeth Moore
- “The ways sexuality plays out in political economies is central. And Cambodia’s political economy is organized around this notion of family. So lesbianism is actually perceived as being threatening to a degree that it would have not been, for example, under socialist East Germany. But it’s one of the essential issues of women’s freedom: Do you get to do want you want to do with your body? Not if you don’t know what your body is for.” ~ Anne Elizabeth Moore
- “Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxims, Laissez-faire and ‘Pas trop gouverner’ are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least.” ~ George Fitzhugh
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“As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.” ~ John Ruskin
- “Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.” ~ Simon Critchley
- “I call this the Fundamental Problem of Political Economy. How do we limit the power that idiots have over us? … [Milton] Friedmans insight is that a market limits the power that others have over us; conversely, limiting the power that others have over us allows us to have markets. Friedman argued that no matter how wise the officials of government may be, market competition does a better job of protecting us from idiots.” ~ Arnold Kling
- “Thus, if there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law. Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.” ~ Frederic Bastiat
- “Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.” ~ John Stuart Mill
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“The opposing tendencies of concentration and spread are of little consequence in the liberal model of political economy.” ~ Robert Gilpin
- “In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.” ~ Karl Marx
- “The primary social goal of both systems of political economy is for middle-aged men to attract good-looking younger women. Democratic capitalists believe that good-looking younger women are attracted mainly by money. Social democratic capitalists believe that they are attracted mainly by power.” ~ Gary North
- “The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
- “Which is to say that culture is not a reflex of political economy, but
that society is now a reflex of key shifts in music theory and practice….
[Sampladelia is] the sound made by those early-twentieth-century discoveries
in particle physics and relativiity theory, the projection of the minds of
Einstein, Heisenbery, and Bohr, their fateful explorations of liquid time,
curving space, uncertainty fields and relativity theorems, into densely
configured and fully ambivalent android music tracks” ~ Arthur Kroker -
“The principles of political economy have elevated the working class above the place they ever filled before.” ~ Richard Cobden
- “Basically political economy – that you have to look at how funding structures shape the media landscape. You have to look at commercial interests, consolidation – the economy structures are experience.” ~ Astra Taylor
- “Among minor alterations, I may mention the substitution for the name political economy of the single convenient term economics. I cannot help thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our science.” ~ William Stanley Jevons
- “Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.” ~ C. Wright Mills
- “Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life.” ~ Vilfredo Pareto
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“Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.” ~ David Harvey
- “A cold-blooded, calculation, unprincipled, usurper, without a virtue, no statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists’ ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “All those who, since Adam Smith, have turned their attention to Political Economy, agree that in reality we do not buy articles of consumption with money, the circulating medium with which we pay for them. We must in the first instance have bought this money itself by the sale of our produce.” ~ Jean-Baptiste Say
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“The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx’s critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism.” ~ David Harvey
- “Wherefore it is impossible to succeed in comparing wealth of different eras or different nations. This, in political economy, like squaring the circle in mathematics, is impracticable, for want of a common mean or measure to go by.” ~ Jean-Baptiste Say
- “Every great creative idea, formulated as a philosophy, has a social setting – in time, in a geographical location, in a political economy, in a matrix of interests and knowledge. It is not a free-swinging phenomenon like a balloon without moorings. It is not produced in a vacuum and, being creative, it does not work in a vacuum. Nurtured on things experienced and things known, it reaches out toward the unknown like a flower on a stalk growing out of the soil.” ~ Mary Ritter Beard
- “Because of the oil-and-water relationship governments have cultivated between ethics and political economy, speaking in plain terms – spelling it out as it is – as become foreign to the public. So here goes: When government sports a surplus, this implies that the political pickpockets have stolen more funds than they can possibly dream of spending. The property is not theirs to keep! Conversely, when deficits are reported, this means that the kleptomaniacs have not been able to steal sufficient funds to cover their profligacy.” ~ Ilana Mercer
