James Tobin Quotations

My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher.

I happily took for granted that I would attend the very good local university and probably go on to its law school. Harvard was my father's idea.

From 1966 to 1970 I served as Chairman of the New Haven City Plan Commission.

I think the filmmakers and I were interested in telling stories that weren't well known,

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

I was born in Champaign in 1918. From the neighborhood elementary and intermediate schools, I went to the University High School in the twin city, Urbana.

Most important, I have learned from my colleagues and students.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

The stories of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate already had been well-told by others, both on film and in books, ... But here was this remarkable, all-but-unknown story about Gustav Lindenthal and Othmar Ammann ... and how they fought each other to realize the dream of bridging the Hudson with what would be the longest bridge in the world.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

There was considerable danger they'd be forgotten and their contributions buried,

After the United States entered the war, I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.

At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.

The cost overruns for the Big Dig look outrageous to us now ... but many big projects of the past have cost much more than the original estimates, ... (But) cities really don't have much choice. Americans have chosen to live in cities; we have no choice but to keep them livable. And despite the enormous headaches that Bostonians are experiencing now ... in 20 years they're going to be proud as hell, because they'll have the most beautiful and livable downtown in the country.

In 1947 I was elected Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, an appointment that allowed me three years of freedom for study, research, and writing.

I just find Ammann so appealing ... so deliberate, so smart, a walk-the-walk kind of guy who did something he cared about so deeply, ... I kind of fell in love with that bridge, too -- in fact, with the whole suspension bridge form. It's just a beautiful, beautiful structure.

The greatest good fortune of my return to Cambridge in 1946 was that there, in the spring, I met Elizabeth Fay Ringo. We were married a few months later.