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There is something in people you might even call it a little bit of a gambling instinct… I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

Paul Samuelson

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Paul Samuelson
Age: 94 †
Born: 1915
Born: May 15
Died: 2009
Died: December 13
Economist
University Teacher
Gary
Indiana
Paul Anthony Samuelson
Paul A. Samuelson
Littles
Paint
Gambling
Little
Watching
Dry
Might
Exciting
Excitement
Take
Grow
Investing
Even
Bits
Dull
Something
Grows
Grass
Like
Call
Shouldn
People
Tell
Instinct
Vegas

More quotes by Paul Samuelson

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Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas
Paul Samuelson
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First, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).
Paul Samuelson
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Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.
Paul Samuelson
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Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.
Paul Samuelson
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We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.
Paul Samuelson
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Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.
Paul Samuelson
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In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.
Paul Samuelson
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In every mutual fund prospectus, in every sales promotional folder, and in every mutual fund advertisement (albeit in print almost too small to read), the following warning appears: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Paul Samuelson
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The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists' the problem is how to 'find' it.
Paul Samuelson
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The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.
Paul Samuelson
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We're a me-me-me generation. We're borrowing the savings of every nation in the world. We're ... piling up a big tab. Now, I may think we're too big to have a run on us. You may think that. But it's possible that God does not.
Paul Samuelson
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Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'.
Paul Samuelson
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I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets.
Paul Samuelson
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If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.
Paul Samuelson
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When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.
Paul Samuelson
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I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
Paul Samuelson
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Good questions outrank easy answers.
Paul Samuelson
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You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?
Paul Samuelson
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The consumer, so it is said, is the king each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.
Paul Samuelson
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Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics.
Paul Samuelson