“A useful role exists for the economist is making calculations of the prospective costs and/or benefits of alternative policies. This role is precisely the one Keynes had in mind, I assume, when he expressed the hope that we would become useful after the fashion of dentists.”

"The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency." 1988

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George Stigler20

American economist 1911–1991

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 1 : The Way We Live Now

“Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression; it’s not my role to be expressive. I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let’s say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions, which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish kapoor in conversation with Homi K. Bhabha in 1998. Quoted in pdf, Anish Kapoor, 18 December 2013, Royal Academy Organization http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/files/anish-kapoor-education-guide-558.pdf,

“My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

“In fact, the only person to rival Friedman for policy influence in the twentieth century is John Maynard Keynes, who had a strikingly different view of the role of government. Keynes was influential because he advocated more government intervention into what he perceived as poorly functioning private economies caught up in the Great Depression. In contrast to Keynes, Friedman put the main blame for the Depression on government failures, especially of monetary policy. Hence, the Depression did not make Friedman a fan of big government. He also found in the Federal Reserve’s failure to prevent deflation an argument in favor of monetary rules. As the world evolved— with low inflation becoming the major mission of central banks and free markets and secure property rights becoming the main policies to promote economic growth—Friedman surely won the intellectual battle.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Source: Nothing Is Sacred (2002), p. 2

“No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 624, as translated by Tobias Dantzig in Number, the Language of Science. Fourth edition, New York: Doubleday 1954, p 141. See discussion of this entry for details.
The Will to Power (1888)

“Posito I assume and when I say posito, I have the right to assume the unlikely; therefore posito, I assume that Mr. A. A., whose promises supposedly have not weakened him, went to work and wrote the system. Posito, I assume, and when I say posito, I have the right to assume what is more unreasonable than the most unreasonable; therefore; posito, I assume that if Mr. A. A. did not write the system, then Mr. B. B. wrote it-then what? Let us linger for a moment on this thought, with which, of course, we have all been familiar for several years: the thought of the prospect for the hope of the system. Therefore, in order to be very brief, posito, I assume that the system appeared here in Copenhagen, then what? Then one would indeed have to read it, unless Mr. C. C. would instantly be kind and philanthropic enough to promise a summary of the system and also position us in the point of view; then we would again be saved by the promise. If this does not happen, then of course one would have to read it. How troublesome, and who would finally benefit from that?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Prefaces, Nichol, 1997 p. 39-40
1840s, Prefaces (1844)

“The role of reason is not to make us wise but to reveal our ignorance”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Commonly attributed to Hume, but without any apparent basis.
Misattributed

“Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced.”

Taiichi Ohno (1912–1990) Japanese businessman and engineer

Taiichi Ohnos Workplace Management: Special 100th Birthday Edition: Special 100th Birthday Edition (ed. McGraw Hill Professional, 2012), ISBN 9780071808019

“Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.

It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", pp. 319–320

“We can only hope that statisticians will return to the use of the simple, lucid reasoning of Bayes's conceptions, and accord to the likelihood theory its proper role.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Fifth Lecture, Applications in Statistics and the Theory of Errors, p. 159
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

“A useful role exists for the economist is making calculations of the prospective costs and/or benefits of alternative policies. This role is precisely the one Keynes had in mind, I assume, when he expressed the hope that we would become useful after the fashion of dentists.”

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George Stigler20

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