George Stigler Quotes

• ...it is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.

  George Stigler

  Knowing, Answers, Economics

  52 Copy quote

• Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower.

  George Stigler

  Weed, Flower, Competition

  26 Copy quote

• If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.

  George Stigler

  Airports, Missing, Too Much

  20 Copy quote

• Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory.

  George Stigler

  Beats, Theory, Rejected

  15 Copy quote

• Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.

  George Stigler

  Philosophy, Years, Law

  25 Copy quote

• Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.

  George Stigler

  Mother, Faces, Lectures

  22 Copy quote

• There is only one social science and we are its practitioners

  George Stigler

  Social, Social Science

  28 Copy quote

• Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition.

  George Stigler

  Self, Competition, Important

  14 Copy quote

• Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

  George Stigler

  Discovery, Law, Scientific Discovery

  10 Copy quote

• The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization

  George Stigler

  Return, Study, Insight

  41 Copy quote

• The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.

  George Stigler

  Issues, Intellectual, Mind

  28 Copy quote

• I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.

  George Stigler

  Mother, Asking, Answers

  16 Copy quote

• Henry Ford made a lot of money making cars at one time, but that was a small advantage to him compared to the benefit to millions of people who for the first time in their lives were emancipated from common public carriers and could live where they wanted, move at the hours they wanted, to the places they wanted. Ford collected a billion bucks, but that was peanuts compared to the benefits.

  George Stigler

  Money, Moving, Car

  4 Copy quote

• All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

  George Stigler

  Two, Milton, Economist

  11 Copy quote

• Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.

  George Stigler

  Confused, Science, Ideas

  6 Copy quote

• ...the number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.

  George Stigler

  Men, Numbers, Levels

  George Joseph Stigler, Paul Anthony Samuelson (1963). “A Dialogue on the Proper Economic Role of the State”

  10 Copy quote

• A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens.

  George Stigler

  Native Language, People, Citizens

  15 Copy quote

• My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director.

  George Stigler

  Faith, Directors, Fierce

  Biographical, www.nobelprize.org. 1982.

  7 Copy quote

• Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price.

  George Stigler

  Yield, Chicago, Economic

  6 Copy quote

• I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.

  George Stigler

  Wife, Chicago, Married

  7 Copy quote

• My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.

  George Stigler

  Training, Chicago, Graduates

  6 Copy quote

• In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained.

  George Stigler

  Chicago

  8 Copy quote

• I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at Northwestern University.

  George Stigler

  School, Years, Next Year

  52 Copy quote

• That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.

  George Stigler

  Science, Intense, Sociology

  13 Copy quote

• The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

  George Stigler

  Competition, Challenges, Citizens

  Nobel Banquet Speech, www.nobelprize.org. 1982.

  8 Copy quote

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