Joan Robinson

Sourced

• "Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.
  • "Economic Philosophy", Pelican 1964, p. 76.

Unsourced

• "It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles."

• "The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."

• "Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."

• "The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."