William Playfair Quotes

William Playfair , a Scottish engineer and political economist, served as a secret agent on behalf of Great Britain during its war with France. The founder of graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. As secret agent, Playfair reported on the French Revolution and organized a clandestine counterfeiting operation in 1793 to collapse the French currency. Wikipedia

✵ 22. September 1758 – 11. February 1824

William Playfair: 4 quotes 0 likes

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Famous William Playfair Quotes

“The nature of this trade, certainly not the most honourable in the world, affords room for much investigation and remark in a moral or humane point of view: in a political or commercial light it is perhaps less conspicuously an object of attention. It consists chiefly of commodities that are considered as holding a first rate place in the animal and the mineral world, for which in return the Africans receive the most rascally articles that the ingenuity of Europeans has found means to produce. In return to our fellow creatures, for gold, and for ivory, we exchange the basest of those articles that are suited to the taste or the fancy of a despicable set of barbarians. Whether the spirituous liquirs or the fire-arms that are sent there are most calculated for the destruction of the purchasers, might become a question not very easy to determine. The noxious quality of the one is at least equalled by the danger of attending the use of the other. There does not seem to be that regard to honour in this trade, which ought to make part of the nice character of the English merchant, unimpeachable, unimpeached, upon the 'Change of London or of Amsterdam. It seems as if we kept our honour for ourselves, and that with those barbarians (who are more our inferiors in address and cunning, than perhaps in any thing else) no honour, humanity, or equity, were at all necessary.”

William Playfair

Observations on the Trade to Africa, Chart XVI, page 65.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition

“Such is the disposition of men, that we value what is speculative and precarious, more than what is safe and beneficial.”

William Playfair

Observations on the Trade to Flanders, Chart IX, page 40.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition

“Men in general are very slow to enter into what is reckoned a new thing; and there seems to be a very universal as well as great reluctance to undergo the drudgery of acquiring information that seems not to be absolutely necessary.”

William Playfair

Observations on the Trade with North america, Chart V, page 29.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition

“All those things that make a nation richer, stronger, or more happy; or that tend to exalt national character, but that will not pay individuals, deserve public encouragement.”

William Playfair

Observations on the Greenland Trade, Chart XVIII, page 78.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition

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