Arthur Melvin Okun Quotes
The market, if it can be kept honest and competitive, does provide very strong incentives for work effort and productive contributions. In their absence, society would thrash about for alternative incentives-some unreliable, like altruism; some perilous like collective loyalty; some intolerable, like coercion or oppression.
Quotes to Explore
-
You set your goals to a point where they're attainable, but far enough away that you have to really go get them. And every year I push my goals a little bit farther away, and every year I work a little bit harder to get them.
-
Timidity does not inspire bold acts.
-
Somebody was asking me the other day - President Bush is now talking about freedom for the Arab world. I say, well, that's great. I was talking about that fifty years ago.
-
I don't think I've ever sent a text to Gordon Brown because I'm confident that he would absolutely have no idea how to receive it. He barely managed to master WordPerfect 4.1.
-
I'm extremely fascinated by marriage. I want to study marriage. I want to learn about it. I want to know it. I want to figure out whether or not I want to do it. I'm not just going to leap into it, because that's not good for anybody.
-
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
-
I'm lucky in some ways in that I really don't need more than five or so hours of sleep.
-
I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity.
-
Your belief system saturates the space around you.
-
In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
-
The thing that I think a lot of guys need to know how to do is not take your mother's advice about honesty being the best policy. Listen to your cool, drunk uncle who tells you to lie. Those are the relationships that last.
-
When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age.
-
The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
-
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
-
Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that in mental patients excessive affection often turns to violent hostility.
-
My father was dark skinned because he was Tatar. Sometimes Tatars can look Brazilian.
-
Do I think Vince McMahon was looking at my matches in Japan going, 'We need him?' No. He wasn't. He's too busy. There's no way. But somebody may have been looking and going, 'All right, I like this guy. Let's give him a shot.'
-
It's believing you can push through the exhaustion just to be able to sing after you do a cartwheel or a split.
-
I've always avoided publicity. I've never been good copy at any stage of my life. I don't strive for it, because I don't think it's important whether I'm good copy or not. The two can go together, if that's your personality, but every person on this earth is unique.
-
Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness - and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
-
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
-
How wonderful! How wonderful! All things are perfect, exactly as they are.
-
The market, if it can be kept honest and competitive, does provide very strong incentives for work effort and productive contributions. In their absence, society would thrash about for alternative incentives-some unreliable, like altruism; some perilous like collective loyalty; some intolerable, like coercion or oppression.
