"According to a frequently cited definition, economics is the study of “best use of scarce resources.” The definition is incomplete. “Second best” use of resources, and outright wasteful uses, have equal claim to attention. They are the other side of the coin."

“Optimizing responses of economic agents are simultaneously feasible only if the proper prices are already known to them. But these prices must somehow themselves be the result of the same responses.”

“Without recognising indivisibilities — in human person, in residences, plants, equipment, and in transportation — location patterns, down to those of the smallest village, cannot be understood”

“We look upon economic theory as a sequence of conceptual models that seek to express in simplified form different aspects of an always more complicated reality.”

“The solution of important problems may be delayed because the requisite tools are not perceived. Or the availability of certain tools may lead to an awareness of problems, important or not, that can be solved with their help.”

“… a rather different class of applications of the idea of best allocation of scarce resources... usually referred to as the theory of optimal economic growth. In most studies of this kind made in the countries with market economies there is not an identifiable client to whom the findings are submitted as policy recommendations. Nor is there an obvious choice of objective function, such as cost minimization or profit maximization in the studies addressed to individual enterprises. The field has more of a speculative character. The models studied usually contain only a few highly aggregated variables. One considers alternative objective functions that incorporate or emphasize various strands of ethical, political, or social thought. These objectives are then tried out to see what future paths of the economy they imply under equally simplified assumptions of technology or resource availability.”

“While it was long possible and sometimes tempting for physicists to deny the usefulness of the molecular hypothesis, we economists have the good luck of being some of the ‘molecules’ of economic life ourselves, and of having the possibility through human contacts to study the behavior of other ‘molecules’.”