Paul Samuelson

“The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.”

“Funeral by funeral, theory advances.”

“My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.”

“To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.”

“Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks.”

“I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.”

“The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.”

“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.”

“People had J.F.K. all wrong. They thought of him as a dashing, deciding type. He was an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.”

“The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.”

“I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.”