Home > Author > Frank H. Knight
1 " Never waste any time you can spend sleeping. "
― Frank H. Knight
2 " Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. "
― Frank H. Knight , The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays
3 " To call a situation hopeless is to call it ideal. "
4 " [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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
