Business and Economics

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
George Orwell

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language we have jargons; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.
Eric Bentley

People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith

An economist is someone who can’t see something working in practice without asking whether it would work in theory.
Walter Wolfgang Heller, advisor to President Kennedy

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
Alfred A. Knopf

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
Laurence J. Peter

Economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.
Paul Samuelson

Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Economic forecasters were invented to make weather forecasters look good.
Irwin Stelzer

Why did nobody notice it?
Queen Elizabeth II to LSE Professor Luis Garicano asking how economists missed the global crash of 2008

Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future.
Sam Goldwyn

Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
Sometimes attributed to Karl Marx

A fool and his money get a lot of publicity.
Al Bernstein

If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you only have to look at those to whom He gives it.
Maurice Baring

There is plenty of affordable housing. It is simply occupied by the wrong people. The problem in New York is not high rents but low income.
John Gilbert III, President, New York Landlords’ Association

It is a social experience for most people. They want to meet the people in the queue.
David Mills, Chief Executive of the Post Office, defending Post Office queues, 2004

Overseas aid is a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
Peter Bauer

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.
Bob Hope

Never take financial advice from anyone in a tie.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Annals of an Abiding Liberal

In any successful enterprise there must be an uneven number of directors and three is too many.
Giovanni Agnelli, founder of Fiat

It’s easy to become a millionaire – start out as a billionaire, then buy an airline.
Richard Branson

The worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it.
Friedrich Hayek

Finding a businessman interested in the arts is like finding chicken shit in the chicken salad.
Alice Neel

Studying the science of yesteryear one comes upon such interesting notions as gravity, electricity, and the roundness of the earth – while an examination of more recent phenomena shows a strong trend towards spray cheese, stretch denim and the Moog synthesizer.
Fran Lebowitz

I am going into space in a vehicle comprising three million parts – each supplied by the lowest bidder.
Anonymous American astronaut