Douglass North Quotes

24 quotes in 540 categories

• To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions Action
• While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth… Became
• Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political… Adaptive
• Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over… Competition
• The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the… Activity
• Our family life was certainly not intellectual. Family
• In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that… Case
• My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I. Born
• The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of… Character
• I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California… California
• It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant… Began
• What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I… Became
• I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s. Airplane
• I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill… Anybody
• My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking. Analysis
• I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the… Clear
• My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best. Best
• When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the… Accepted
• The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions,… All
• My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of… Been

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