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Economic Historian Inspirational Quotes (81)

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I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.
Douglass North
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There was nothing natural about laissez-faire free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. Just as cotton manufactures were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire was enforced by the state.
Karl Polanyi
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Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the new economic opportunities and provided the framework for a judicial system to protect and encourage productive economic activity
Douglass North
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I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.
Douglass North
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Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
Carlo M. Cipolla
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When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Eric Hobsbawm
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In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85.
Robert Fogel
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All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.
Eric Hobsbawm
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No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
Eric Hobsbawm
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Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.
Eric Hobsbawm
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It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.
Douglass North
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In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.
Niall Ferguson
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It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of the world-system's hierarchy of wage-levels.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.
Douglass North
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The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies.
Niall Ferguson
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While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.
Douglass North
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