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All Douglass North Quotes
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 my work in the last 15 years has been done.
Douglass North
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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 way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.
Douglass North
60% of people like this quote
I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.
Douglass North
56% of people like this quote
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 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
Douglass North
55% of people like this quote
My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
Douglass North
55% of people like this quote
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, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.
Douglass North
54% of people like this quote
I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.
Douglass North
54% of people like this quote
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 young theorist, that I learned economic theory.
Douglass North
53% of people like this quote
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, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.
Douglass North
52% of people like this quote
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 we undertake.
Douglass North
52% of people like this quote
I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.
Douglass North
52% of people like this quote
My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.
Douglass North
50% of people like this quote
My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.
Douglass North
49% of people like this quote
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 convinced that I should become an economist.
Douglass North
47% of people like this quote
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