Economic Aphorisms

“Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked? And, by God, it ought to have both.”— Edward Thurlow, 1st Baron Thurlow, Lord Chancellor of England (1731–1806)

“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company.”— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, interview with Alexis Ohanian (2024)