As a writer, I admire epigrams and bon mots—precise rhetorical constructions that make a point more powerfully than any words I might conceive. These quotes provide useful support when teaching.
I also have a few jokes that I’ve used to good effect in the classroom. Assembling these quotes and jokes into one place fits my purpose in producing this web site. So here they are. Although in some cases it will ruin the joke, I’ve also explained the context(s) where I find these quotes and jokes to be useful.
Last, more than a few quotes turn out to be apocryphal. There’s no written record of the putative author ever making the statement. I find it embarrassing to have that flub pointed out after the fact, so now I do an internet search before use. On the other hand, any quote of something said only orally, and not in writing or on another recorded medium, is vulnerable to challenge. Hence, the circumlocution I’ve used, and seen others use: “A remark often attributed to [famous person] runs: …”
Last, if, like me, you vaguely remember far more quotes than you can reproduce verbatim, search engines are a godsend. My habit is to enter the word quote, followed by author name and a keyword or two. The results are always informative.
I expect to update this page from time to time …
John Maynard Keynes
“In the long run we’re all dead.”
- Helpful in discussing investment outcomes. Useful for mocking investment advice where the preface reads something like “Over the long term [investment] has outperformed… ” Or “Balance will be sooner or later be restored” Or any fatuous-sounding claim that things will sort themselves out in good time.
“When I find I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
- An active debate rages over whether this one is apocryphal. In addition to being possibly apocryphal, it also comes in different versions, so the one above is my own preferred construction, and not likely to be anything Keynes uttered. Oral use only, would be my advice
- I find this quote rather more useful than Emerson’s related quote concerning consistency and small minds.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
- Another possibly apocryphal one.
- Very useful for combatting investment maxims that portray the market as a rule-governed, lawful, predictable thing. Also helpful when you sense that a plausible financial theory has been given hagiographical treatment, or made into a shibboleth.
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
- In the passage where this appears, Keynes makes a larger point, concerning the power of ideas, which recalls some of Michel Foucault’s work (a juxtaposition of authors so incongruous as to be irresistible).
- Useful in contexts where you want to puncture a species of humbug. In America, and in business, there is a strain of anti-intellectualism which holds that the speaker is in no way an intellectual or anything other than a hard-headed empiricist. He (it is most often he) is vehement in his conviction that he deals with facts, not fuzzy ideas, and hard realities, not fancy words. In fact, as the quote argues, he’s no less a creature of ideas. The ideas of which he is unconscious will often be hoary with age and long abandoned in spheres where reason and argument are respected.
- In this quote the fragment “slaves of some defunct” is so instantly recognizable, that you can substitute for the subject and the predicate, and still have a quote that will call up Keynes in the reader’s mind. Like this: “The most hard-boiled advertising man, and the mathematically trained marketing scientist alike, who will have nothing to do with academic controversy, and despise philosophical nitpicking, will often be found the slave of some defunct theory of meaning, already hoary by the Middle Ages, if not discarded earlier in Greece.”
Winston Churchill
“it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
- Helpful in any context where you must defend a flawed alternative as nonetheless the best option available, or when you want to acknowledge and then dismiss many flaws.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”
- Helpful, because so insightful and so true. Useful in counseling friends and family facing conflicting imperatives
- I prefer an alternative version of my own construction, which merges an idea from William James. It is not intelligence, but some other quality of mind, that lets a person function when ideas conflict. Thus: “To be a consumer sociologist requires you to be tough-minded, to hold in mind two opposed notions, without succumbing to either: that if you could do science here, you should; but if you can’t do science here, you ought not to fool yourself on that score ”
Upton Sinclair
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
- Helpful whenever moral hazard is present (a term from economics, pointing to situation where financial incentives are attached to an inferior or morally suspect course of action). An example would be asking a stockbroker, who makes money from selling high fee mutual funds, whether you should switch to index funds.
- The rhetorical structure of this quote is recognizable enough that you can play with the wording, or adapt it to a specific case, as with scholars’ reluctance to accept critiques of significance testing: “it is difficult to make an academic psychologist heed this dictum, when his tenure and promotion depend on his not heeding it.”
Mae West (or maybe PT Barnum or maybe …)
“I don’t care what the newspapers say about me, as long as they spell my name right.”
- The correct attribution for this quote is heavily contested; no one really knows who said it first, or exactly what words they used. Useful nonetheless when you need to point out the irreducible value of sheer name recognition.
Law School joke
The Director of Alumni Relations was presenting results of a survey of law school graduates to the faculty. “We found that our A students get tenure as law professors, our B students get appointed to judgeships …
“What about the C students,” interjected a senior professor.
“Uhh, the C students … get rich”
- Useful in contexts where you wish to mock the pretensions of academics, or the isolation of much academic work from the real world. Of course, to be a Law School professor requires more ability than to be a judge—doesn’t it?
Marketing Scientist joke
[Recruitment for academic jobs in marketing proceeds by scheduling two dozen interviews at a designated conference; these hotel room interviews proceed about an hour at a time, with a goal of identifying the 3 or 4 Ph.D. candidates who will be the finalists flown out for a day-long campus visit]
After a long day of interviewing candidates for the position of assistant professor, the faculty team looked forward to the final interview of the day, a very strong candidate on paper, from a prestigious Ivy League school.
Alas, the dissertation research proved terribly abstract in the telling, and not obviously related to any practical business matter whatsoever. The candidate’s speaking skills weren’t great either. Finally, with a touch of exasperation, one of the senior interviewers asked the candidate about how his idea would work in the real world of business. Might the theory need more development to give it relevance?
The candidate began to shake his head firmly before the interviewer had finished. In a loud voice he laid down this rule:
“Theory general! Real world—only special case.”
The interview soon terminated, to the relief of all.
- Useful in mocking the overly abstract formulations sometimes seen in the social sciences, especially the newer, wannabe sciences, which seek to wrap themselves in the mantle of calculus
Economist joke
An economist, a physicist, and a philosopher were shipwrecked on a desert isle, left with nothing but the rags they wore. All they could find to eat was a large can of pineapples that had washed up from the wreck.
They began to argue about how to open the can.
The philosopher spoke first: “look, if we reason logically from true premises, in time we will reach a true conclusion, and know with certainty how that can must be opened.”
The physicist laughed at him. “That’s ridiculous. Your approach has been obsolete for centuries. We need to scour the beach for a piece of broken glass, grind it into a lens, use that lens to focus the sun’s rays on the weakest part of the can, burn a hole through it, widen that hole with a stick, and eat.”
As the physicist and philosopher berated one another, the economist looked on bemused. Finally he spoke: “Look, assume we have a can opener. It follows mathematically that …”
- Useful when faced with an elegant mathematical formulation whose assumptions cannot ever be met in any practical circumstance.