Frank H. Knight > Quotes

“Never waste any time you can spend sleeping.”
― Frank H. Knight

“To call a situation hopeless is to call it ideal.”
― Frank H. Knight

“The mathematical economists have commonly been mathematicians first and economists afterward, disposed to oversimplify the data and underestimate the divergence between their premises and facts of life.”
― Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“[The]...feeling for what one should want, in contrast with actual desire, is stronger in the unthinking than in those sophisticated by education. It is the later who argues into the ‘tolerant’ (economic) attitude of de gustibus non est disputandum [in matters of taste, there can be no disputes]; the man in the street is more likely to view the individual whose tastes are ‘wrong’ as a scurvy fellow who ought to be despised if not beaten up or shot.”
― Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“Economics, or more properly theoretical economics, is the only one of the social sciences which has aspired to the distinction of an exact science. To the extent that it is an exact science it must accept the limitations as well as share the dignity thereto pertaining, and it thus becomes like physics or mathematics in being necessarily somewhat abstract and unreal. In fact it is different from physics in degree, since, though it cannot well be made so exact, yet for special reasons it secures a moderate degree of exactness only at the cost of much greater unreality.”
― Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit

“Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated..... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or "risk" proper.... is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.”
― Frank Hyneman Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit

“The value of the method depends on the fact that in large groups of problem situations certain elements are common and are not merely present in each single case, but in addition are both few in number and important enough largely to dominate the situations.”
― Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit

“Insofar as man is wise or good, his ‘character’ is acquired chiefly by posing as better than he is, until a part of his pretense becomes a habit.”
― Frank H. Knight

“Thus, in physics, the model and archetype of an exact science of nature, a relatively small and workable number of laws or principles tell us what would happen if simplified conditions be assumed and all disturbing factors eliminated. The simplified conditions include specifications as to dimensions, mass, shape, smoothness, rigidity, elasticity and properties generally of the objects worked with, specifications usually quite impossible to realize in fact, yet”
― Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit

“The value of the method depends on the fact that in large groups of problem situations certain elements are common and are not merely present in each single case, but in addition are both few in number and important enough largely to dominate the situations. The laws of these few elements, therefore, enable us to reach an approximation to the law of the situation as a whole.”
― Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit