Alan Greenspan's Quotes

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

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.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.

The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

Whatever you tax, you get less of.

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense... that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.

I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.