Martin Wolf famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The four most dangerous words in finance are 'this time is different.' Thanks to this masterpiece by Carmen Reinhart at the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, no one can doubt this again. . . . The authors have put an immense amount of work into collecting the data financial institutions needed if they were to have any chance of making quantitative risk management work.
-- Martin Wolf

#Data #Risk #Doubt
People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises - or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls 'Black Swans' - are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too
-- Martin Wolf

#Ignorance #Thinking #Swans
Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades
-- Martin Wolf

#Animal #Space #Diversity
Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existedâ€”and never will
-- Martin Wolf

#Saint #Immorality #Capitalism
The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks' often foolish lending.
-- Martin Wolf

#Essence #Foolish #Creation
In order to change the system, we need to change our ideas.
-- Martin Wolf

#Order #Ideas #Needs
There is no room for being creative in todayâ€™s business... Except for finding creative ways to be inefficient.
-- Martin Wolf

#Creative #Today #Way
The notion of the competitiveness of countries, on the model of the competitiveness of companies, is nonsense.
-- Martin Wolf

#Country #Nonsense #Notion
Sustaining growth is the century's big challenge.
-- Martin Wolf

#Challenges #Growth #Century

The distinction between right and wrong ("la distinction du bien et du mal", Fr.), is nothing else than their unyielding (or implacable) opposition; thus the moral consciousness is an innate and intimate revelation of the absolute, which goes beyond (or goes pass, or exceed) every empirical data (or given information). It is only on these principles that we will be able to establish ("pourront Ãªtre Ã©difiÃ©es", Fr.) the real basis of morality.
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.
It is not a medicine. You don't know what's in it. If there were compelling scientific and medical data supporting marijuana's medical benefits that would be one thing. But the data is not there.
There is good news in the data the strongest support for priests is to be found among the younger generation.
Risk is just an expensive substitute for information.
History is the great propagator of doubt.
Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
Life for delays and doubts no time does give, None ever yet made haste enough to live.
I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.

Martin Wolf famous quotes

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