Maurice Allais Quotations

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

My approach has never been to start from theories to arrive at facts, but on the contrary, to try to bring out from the facts the explanatory thread without which they appear incomprehensible and elude effective action.

I was born May 31, 1911, in Paris. My parents owned a small cheese shop, and my maternal grandfather was a carpentry worker. I thus came from what is commonly known as the working class.

My motivation was an idea of being able to improve the conditions of life, to try to find a remedy to many of the problems facing the world. That's what led me into economics. I saw it as a way of helping people.

We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.

Throughout the years following World War II and until the formation of the European Economic Community in 1958, I was very active as a national or international rapporteur at many of the international conferences aiming to establish an European community.

At the beginning of my career, my desire to understand was associated with a profound desire to act, with the wish to influence opinion and policy; but, over the years, this motivation has come to be of secondary importance, far behind my desire to understand.

Fascinated by history during my secondary education, then by physics and mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique, I finally entered the national administration of mines in 1936.

It would be just as pointless to oppose the international use of English today as it would have been to oppose the worldwide use of French in the 18th century.

It is understandable that the Fed injects cash to avoid the collapse of the stock market, but basically it is bad policy for monetary authorities to intervene to save speculators from bankruptcy. This is not their role.

In August 1914, my father was called to war and then taken prisoner. He died in captivity in Germany on March 27, 1915. My youth - indeed, my entire life - was deeply marked by this, directly and indirectly.

In principle, junk bonds are basically useful, but they are used excessively and irrationally, notably in takeovers.

I received my high school baccalaureate diploma in Latin and Science in 1928, then my two baccalaureate diplomas in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1929.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

In fact, without any exaggeration, the current mechanism of money creation through credit is certainly the "cancer" that's irretrievably eroding market economies of private property.

Anyone who dares to speak about an aether is regarded as an ignorant and backward mind and he can only lose his credibility in scientific circles, although in reality those who criticize him use the same concept of intermediate medium in other words, whether it be fields, an associated fluid, a probability fluid, a pilot fluid, a quantum fluid, etc.

Too many theorists have a tendency to ignore facts that contradict their convictions.

A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.

All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data.