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In the long run we are all dead.
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It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
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Silvio Gesell's chiefwork is written in cool and scientific terms, although it is run through by a more passionate and charged devotion to social justice than many think fit for a scholar. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell then from that of Marx.
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The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.
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Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold standard.
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Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
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The mechanism of reaching equilibrium by means of a rising cost of living, which is vainly pursued by a rising level of wages, will be described in the next chapter. But it is admitted on all hands that this is the worst possible solution.
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The duty of 'saving' became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.
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God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
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It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
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Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
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Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
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The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.
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When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
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If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.
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Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
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For each individual it is a great advantage to retain the rights over the fruits of his labour even though he must put off the enjoyment of them. His personal wealth is thus increased. For that is what wealth is,-command of the right to postponed consumption.
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There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.
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Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters currency debasement than they are now.
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If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
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Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
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I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.
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Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
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The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.