The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. […] He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future.
John Maynard Keynes – British economist and investor (1883-1946), from his obituary essay on his teacher Alfred Marshall (English economist, 1842-1924), published in “The Economic Journal”, Vol. 34, No. 135 (Sep., 1924)