“The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew.”
Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright
"Fir Dores Fir Tzavoes", 1901. Alle Verk, iv. 237.
Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter III, The Founders Of Political Economy, p. 97
“The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew.”
Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright
"Fir Dores Fir Tzavoes", 1901. Alle Verk, iv. 237.
“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)
Original: (fr) Pour le commerçant, l’honnêteté elle-même est une spéculation de lucre.
Ramnath Goenka (1904–1991) Indian politician
By B. G. Verghese in [B. G. Verghese, Warrior of the Fourth Estate: Ramnath Goenka of the Express, http://books.google.com/books?id=jPZkAAAAMAAJ, 2005, Viking, 978-0-670-05842-6]
“The law merchant respects the religion of different people.”
Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough (1750–1818) Lord Chief Justice of England
Lindo v. Unsworth (1811), 2 Camp. 603.
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist
Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935), p. 59
Context: There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. The primitive exercise of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest, confiscation, expropriation, and the introduction of a slave-economy. The conqueror parcelled out the conquered territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their needs and desires by exploiting the labour of the enslaved inhabitants. The feudal State, and the merchant-State, wherever found, merely took over and developed successively the heritage of character, intention and apparatus of exploitation which the primitive State transmitted to them; they are in essence merely higher integrations of the primitive State.
The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of the political means. Now, since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can – exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means.
Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist
Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 24, Beauty and the Beast, p. 268
“Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable.”
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 27 (p. 312)
Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten (1830–1913) Anglo-Irish rower, barrister, politician and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary
Drummond v. Van Ingen (1887), L. R. 12 Ap. Cas. 297.
Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: (1776), Book III, Chapter IV, p. 456.