I could fill volumes with what I don't think is relevant from the American Economic Review.
qtd in the 1987 bay delta hearings, from Tim Quinn, cross examined by Tom Graff
Should we recycle or put in into a landfill? If I have to pay more for recycling than it costs to put in into the landfill, not only is it garbage, the policy itself is garbage
Mike Munger, Duke economist
Whenever you observe bipartisan cooperation, hold on to your wallet and run to the basement
Arthur Laffer
The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the n’th power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn well pleases.
Sir Josiah Stamp
“Econometric theory is like an exquisitely balanced French recipe, spelling out precisely with how many turns to mix the sauce, how many carats of spice to add, and for how many milliseconds to bake the mixture at exactly 474 degrees of temperature.” “But when the statistical cook turns to raw materials, he finds that hearts of cactus fruit are unavailable, so he substitutes chunks of cantaloupe; where the recipe calls for vermicelli he uses shredded wheat; and he substitutes green garment dye for curry, ping-pong balls for turtle’s eggs, and, for Chaligougnac vintage 1883, a can of turpentine.”
Valavanis
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
Groucho Marx
A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx
I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty
Grouch Marx
I will not be forced to learn a foreign language to accomodate illegals in my country!
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy"
Albert Einstein
No one ever clapped at the end of a CALFED meeting.
Steve Ritchie, South Bay Restoration Manager
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman
Nuannaarpoq --L'immense plaisir que l'on éprouve du seul fait d'être en vie (Taking extravagant pleasure in being alive)
Quality possesed by Eskimos
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away”
Antoine de Saint Exupery
They can't touch me. I come in through the window. I go out through the door. They don't know what hit 'em”
Lee in True West
Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say.
Casey in The Grapes of Wrath
I ain't a-goin.
Grandpa in The Grapes of Wrath
This paper draws on the theory of monopsony and oligopsony to develop an empirical test for the presence of the market power where an exogenous shock on the relevant market may be observed. An application of this test is demonstrated for the tomato processing industry, where the exogenous shock is created by the introduction of mechanical harvesting technology. The results are remarkably consistent with oligopsonistic dominant firm-price leadership. Statistical tests suggest rejection of the null hypothesis of competition.
Abstract to an econ article, presented as jibberish in The New Yorker
Only the government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink, and make the combination worthless
Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman
A man's only as old as the woman he feels.
Groucho Marx
The intense light activates some neurological response: I feel in my shoulder blades what Icarus was thinking and Daedalus knew. The heat from the shale paving the ground sears up through my sneakers, shimmers my horizons. It is a moment of suspended time when one could so easily cross over into another dimension, a feeling neither of exhiliration nor euphoria, but simply of infinite possibilities.
Ann Zwinger, Run, River, Run p 249
A collared lizard, sunning on a rock, flies off at my approach...It is a tiny, enameled dinosaur, jeweled, curious, watchful...I watch for it across the ramainder of the saddle. The enchantment persists, as if on top of this ridge with a river on either side I participated in another life that belongs to this hot, dry sky-bottomed world. Something at this moment reaches across genera and order, straight to the beating of heart, a sense of being so heightened that I walk outside of myself into another dimension of sunlight.
Ann Zwinger, Run, River, Run p 250
…civilized man tends to be in a state of chronic worry and fear and anxiety, because he is always confronted not with the simple actuality of what is happening before him but with the innumerable possibilities of what might happen. And since, because of this, his emotional existence tends to be in a chronic state of anxiety and tension, he increasingly loses the ability to relate to the concrete world as it manifests himself in the actual present in which he lives. He becomes so tied up inside that, as it were, the channels of his sensibility become blocked. He gets a kind of neurological sclerosis, a kind of inability to give himself permission to be spontaneous, to be alive with full joyous abandonment. Thus, the more civilized we become, the more stuffy we get. And, therefore, the need arises for various ways of liberating ourselves from society, for entering what the Indians call vanaprastha, the life of a forest dweller. Because when a person reaches a certain point in life when he says, "I have had enough of all this. I am simply tired of making life not worth living, by constantly living through the horrors of what might happen, for the sake of efficiency and membership in the community. Let me just get away from it all for a while and find out what the score is for me, myself. I am tired of being told what I ought to believe. I am tired of being told how I ought to see, how I ought to behave, how I ought to feel. Let me find out for myself who I really am."
Alan Watts
A women drove me to drink, and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.
W.C. Fields
Work is the curse of the drinking class.
Oscar Wilde
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
Henny Youngman
My road calls me, lures me, West, east, south and north; Most roads lead men homewards But my road leads me forth To add more miles to the tally Of grey miles left behind In quest of that one beauty God put me here to find.
Masefield
Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion
A computer without Windows is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.