“Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”

“Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.”

“It's only us… / Generation of upset people / Without Saints or Heroes… / It's only us…”

“Rather like the Bible is for many Christians, the General Theory is the essential economics reference which few economists have ever read.”

“We economists love to quote Keynes’s final lines in his 1936 General Theory—for the reason that they cater so well to our vanity and self-importance. But to admit the truth, madmen in authority can self generate their own frenzies without needing help from either defunct or avant-garde economists. What establishment economists brew up is as often what the Prince and the Public are already wanting to imbibe. We guys don’t stay in the best club by proffering the views of some past academic crank or academic sage.”

“Economists are neither distinctively good nor bad, no more or less virtuous or brave or generous or faithful than the sum of mankind, and certainly no more modest.”

“One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification have been developed by economists. One is the method of partial equilibrium analysis (or microeconomics), generally associated with the name of Alfred Marshall and the other is the method of aggregation (or macro-economics), associated with the name of John Maynard Keynes.”

“A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.”

“My hero is a person whose general interests and values really drives them well beyond job security or even popularity.”

“The rejection of concern for practical goals expressed in the German Society for Sociology's founding charter represented the culmination of a debate in the Social Policy Association, the so-called Werturteilsstreit, in which a group of young political economists, including Ferdinand Tonnies, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, attacked the older generation of political economists for mixing facts and values, science and politics.”