Alan Greenspan > Quotes

“ I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”
― Alan Greenspan

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
― Alan Greenspan

“There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong.”
― Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence

“I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I said.”
― Alan Greenspan

“under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation”
― Alan Greenspan

“government regulation cannot substitute for individual integrity.”
― Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

“Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.”
― Alan Greenspan

“If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005.”
― Alan Greenspan

“People do not realize in [the U.S], for example, how tenuous our ties to international energy are. That is, we on a daily basis require continuous flow. If that flow is shut off, it causes catastrophic effects in the industrial world. And it's that which made [Saddam Hussein] far more important to get out than bin Laden.
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― Alan Greenspan

“We had a bubble in housing.”
― Alan Greenspan

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.”
― Alan Greenspan

“The United States is also losing the rugged pioneering spirit that once defined it. In 1850, Herman Melville boasted that “we are the pioneers of the world, the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World.”7 Today many of the descendants of these pioneers are too terrified of tripping up to set foot on any new path. The problem starts with school. In 2013, a school district in Maryland banned, among other things, pushing children on swings, bringing homemade food into school, and distributing birthday invitations on school grounds.8 It continues in college, where professors have provided their charges with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” It extends to every aspect of daily life. McDonald’s prints warning signs on its cups of coffee pointing out that “this liquid may be hot.” Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”9 Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“John Jacob Astor succeeded in amassing America’s biggest fortune by trading in the furs of beavers, otters, muskrats, and bears (though he wisely used some of the money he made from hunting in America’s great wilderness to buy real estate in Manhattan).”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region. The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country’s television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“More than 90 percent of Americans lived in the countryside, either on farms or plantations. Only three cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, had populations of more than 16,000, making them flyspecks compared with London (750,000) or Peking (almost 3 million).6”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“In the nineteenth century, the population multiplied by a factor of almost fifteen, from 5.3 million to 76 million, a total larger than any European country except Russia. By 1890, 80 percent of New York’s citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, as were 87 percent of Chicago’s.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“The population of the Pacific states increased by 110 percent from 1940 to 1960.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard isn't what I meant”
― Alan Greenspan

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure realized that what you heard isn't what I meant”
― Alan Greenspan

“Eisenhower’s biggest domestic achievement was arguably the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which called for 41,000 miles of highways to be built by 1969 at an estimated cost of $ 25 billion. Predictably enough, the targets were missed: the first transcontinental interstate, I-80, was not finished until 1986 and the southern interstate, I-10, was not completed until 1990.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
― Alan Greenspan

“By one estimate, U.S. output per worker hour was double Germany’s and five times Japan’s.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said but Im not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
― Álan Greenspan

“(thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“The Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And that means basically that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take. So long as that is in place, and there is no evidence that the administration, or congress, or anybody else is requesting that we do things other than what we think is the appropriate thing, then what the relationships are don't frankly matter. And I've had very good relationship with presidents.”
― Alan Greenspan

“The James Hills and J.P. Morgans are an affront to a society dedicated to the worship of mediocrity.”
― Alan Greenspan