Top 40 Paul Samuelson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws-or crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economics textbooks.”

— Paul Samuelson

3. “The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.”

— Paul Samuelson

4. “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

5. “Funeral by funeral, theory advances.”

— Paul Samuelson

6. “Economics has never been a science – and it is even less now than a few years ago.”

— Paul Samuelson

7. “Good questions outrank easy answers.”

— Paul Samuelson

8. “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

9. “A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”

— Paul Samuelson

10. “Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear – and what they want to hear is what won’t happen.”

— Paul Samuelson

11. “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

12. “Economists have much to be humble about.”

— Paul Samuelson

13. “Man does not live by GNP alone.”

— Paul Samuelson

14. “Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.”

— Paul Samuelson

15. “What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don’t know very much.”

— Paul Samuelson

16. “Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information. is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.”

— Paul Samuelson

17. “Forsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.”

— Paul Samuelson

18. “You know what happiness is: ‘Having a little more money than your colleagues.’ And that’s not so tough in academic life.”

— Paul Samuelson

19. “Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man’s lifeblood is another man’s cancer.”

— Paul Samuelson

20. “We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.”

— Paul Samuelson

21. “Thousands of important and intelligent men have never been able to grasp the principle of comparative advantage or believe it even after it was explained to them.”

— Paul Samuelson

22. “Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.”

— Paul Samuelson

23. “Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.”

— Paul Samuelson

24. “Economics never was a dismal science. I should be a realistic science.”

— Paul Samuelson

25. “Asia’s governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies – and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.”

— Paul Samuelson

26. “Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It’s an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.”

— Paul Samuelson

27. “It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.”

— Paul Samuelson

28. “I’m not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that’s been happening for along time.”

— Paul Samuelson

29. “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

30. “Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”

— Paul Samuelson

31. “Marshall’s crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.”

— Paul Samuelson

32. “Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.”

— Paul Samuelson

33. “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

34. “That’s what I would like to do until the end of time, to go on scribbling my articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building, in between playing tennis and drinking coffee at my other study in the Concord Avenue branch of Burger King.”

— Paul Samuelson

35. “I don’t care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.”

— Paul Samuelson

36. “The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.”

— Paul Samuelson

37. “For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?”

— Paul Samuelson

38. “Reasonable men are not reasonable when you’re in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.”

— Paul Samuelson

39. “The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”

— Paul Samuelson

40. “Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently – logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.”

— Paul Samuelson

41. “The sad truth is that it is precisely those who disagree most with the hypothesis of efficient market pricing of stocks, those who pooh-pooh beta analysis and all that, who are least able to understand the analysis needed to test that hypothesis.”

— Paul Samuelson

42. “Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they’ll all turn over together.”

— Paul Samuelson

43. “What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”

— Paul Samuelson

44. “Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.”

— Paul Samuelson

45. “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

46. “An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn’t called a decade of greed.”

— Paul Samuelson

47. “I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn’t because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn’t get a nibble.”

— Paul Samuelson

48. “The recent market run-up that appreciated run-of-the- mill shares also chanced to send up those token gold holdings. Pure luck, undeserved and unlikely to reoccur. Good questions outrank easy answers.”

— Paul Samuelson

49. “It isn’t that greed’s increased. What’s increased is the realization that you’ve got a free field to reach out for what you’d like to do.”

— Paul Samuelson