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Vilfredo Pareto Quotes

Vilfredo Federico Damaso was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.

He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. He was also the first to discover that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him, and it was built on observations of his such as that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by about 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of sociology and mathematics, according to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson:



His legacy as an economist was profound. Partly because of him, the field evolved from a branch of moral philosophy as practised by Adam Smith into a data intensive field of scientific research and mathematical equations. His books look more like modern economics than most other texts of that day: tables of statistics from across the world and ages, rows of integral signs and equations, intricate charts and graphs. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. July 1848 – 19. August 1923
Vilfredo Pareto photo

Works

Manual of Political Economy
Vilfredo Pareto: 14 quotes2 likes

Famous Vilfredo Pareto Quotes

“Empirical laws […] have only slight or even no value beyond the limits within which they have been observed to be true.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 291.
Manual of Political Economy

“The diverse natures of men, combined with the necessity to satisfy in some manner the sentiment which desires them to be equal, has had the result that in the democracies they have endeavored to provide the appearance of power in the people and the reality of power in an elite.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 97.
Manual of Political Economy

“Society is not homogeneous, and those who do not deliberately close their eyes have to recognize that men differ greatly from one another from the physical, moral, and intellectual viewpoints.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 281.
Manual of Political Economy

“For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 321.
Manual of Political Economy

“Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 297.
Manual of Political Economy

“Usually, so far as improvement in the people's economic conditions is concerned, humanitarians simply play the role of the busybody.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 301.
Manual of Political Economy

Vilfredo Pareto Quotes about men

“Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 95.
Manual of Political Economy

“When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 94.
Manual of Political Economy

“The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 90.
Manual of Political Economy

Vilfredo Pareto Quotes

“It is a known fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 92.
Manual of Political Economy

“Increase in the wealth per capita fosters democracy; but the latter, at least according to what we have been able to observe up to now, entails great destruction of wealth and even eventually dries up the sources of it. Hence it is its own grave-digger, it destroys what gave it birth.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 300.
Manual of Political Economy

“The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 94.
Manual of Political Economy

“Assume that the new elite were clearly and simply to proclaim its intentions which are to supplant the old elite; no one would come to its assistance, it would be defeated before having fought a battle. On the contrary, it appears to be asking nothing for itself, well knowing that without asking anything in advance it will obtain what it wants as a consequence of its victory.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 92.
Manual of Political Economy

“History is a graveyard of aristocracies.”

Vilfredo Pareto

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