Quotes about buyer

A collection of quotes on the topic of buyer, seller, market, marketer.

Quotes about buyer

“Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing — since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme — I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers, and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting

Men, Way

“The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer, And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Wages of Labor, p. 20.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

Life, Dependency

“1. Never give anything away for nothing. 2. Never give more than you have to (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3. Always take back everything if you possibly can.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

On drug dealing, quoted in The Daily Telegraph (1964)

Waiting

“Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.”

W. Chan Kim book Blue Ocean Strategy

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy, 2005, p. 13 (2016 extended edition)

“The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.”

Theodore Levitt (1925–2006) American economist and professor at Harvard Business School

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 10

Idea

“Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow’s business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

Wisdom, World, Business

“Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market. (footnote 4: The original contributions were those of Hayek”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

1937 and 1945)
Douglass North, in "Structure and Change in Economic History" (1981), p. 36

“A people that sells its own children is more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Un peuple qui trafique de ses enfants est encore plus condamnable que l’acheteur: ce négoce démontre notre supériorité; ce qui se donne un maître était né pour en avoir. Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Espit des Nations (1753), ch. CXCVII: Résumé de toute cette histoire jusqu’au temps où commence le beau siècle de Louis XIV http://www.voltaire-integral.com/Html/13/02ESS197.html#197 Citas

Children, People

“This Five Year Plan had been drawn up after the most careful thought and investigation. The whole country had been surveyed by scientists and engineers, and numerous experts had discussed the problem of fitting in one part of the programme into another. For, the real difficulty came in this fitting in… But Russia had one great advantage over the capitalist countries. Under capitalism all these activities are left to individual initiative and chance, and owing to competition there is waste of effort. There is no co-ordination between different producers or different sets of workers, except the chance co-ordination which arises in the buyers and sellers coming to the same market… The Soviet Government had the advantage of controlling all the different industries and activities in the whole Union, and so it could draw up and try to work a single co-ordinated plan in which every activity found its proper place. There would be no waste in this, except such waste as might come from errors of calculation or working, and even such errors could be rectified far sooner with a unified control than otherwise.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Drawing, Chance, Country, Problem

“I felt like a car that had only been operated by one driver… a car its new prospective buyer was determined to take to the Daytona 500.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

Cars

“As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Life, Effort

“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.”

Joel Salatin (1957) American environmentalist

Source: Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food

Children, World, Food

“What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“When I asked Bhutto what he thought of Assad, he described the Syrian leader as “The Levanter.” Knowing that, like himself, I was a keen reader of thrillers, the Pakistani Prime Minister knew that I would get the message. However, it was only months later when, having read Eric Ambler’s 1972 novel The Levanter that I understood Bhutto’s one-word pen portrayal of Hafez Al-Assad. In The Levanter the hero, or anti-hero if you prefer, is a British businessman who, having lived in Syria for years, has almost “gone native” and become a man of uncertain identity. He is a bit of this and a bit of that, and a bit of everything else, in a region that is a mosaic of minorities. He doesn’t believe in anything and is loyal to no one. He could be your friend in the morning but betray you in the evening. He has only two goals in life: to survive and to make money… Today, Bashar Al-Assad is playing the role of the son of the Levanter, offering his services to any would-be buyer through interviews with whoever passes through the corner of Damascus where he is hiding. At first glance, the Levanter may appear attractive to those engaged in sordid games. In the end, however, the Levanter must betray his existing paymaster in order to begin serving a new one. Four years ago, Bashar switched to the Tehran-Moscow axis and is now trying to switch back to the Tel-Aviv-Washington one that he and his father served for decades. However, if the story has one lesson to teach, it is that the Levanter is always the source of the problem, rather than part of the solution. ISIS is there because almost half a century of repression by the Assads produced the conditions for its emergence. What is needed is a policy based on the truth of the situation in which both Assad and ISIS are parts of the same problem.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Like Father, Like Son http://www.aawsat.net/2015/02/article55341622/opinion-like-father-like-son, Ashraq Al-Awsat (February 20, 2015).

Life, Money, Truth, Game

“Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers. The simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost.”

W. Chan Kim book Blue Ocean Strategy

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy, 2005, p. 17-18 (2016 extended edition)

“We must take note of the fact that the artist nowadays is occupied with painting flags, posters, pots and pans textiles and things like that. What is referred to as 'artistic work' has on the vast majority of occasions nothing whatever to do with creative effort: and the term 'artistic work' is used in order to demonstrate the 'sacredness' of the work which the artist does at his easel. The conception of 'artistic work' presupposes a distinction between useful and useless work and as there are only a few artists buyers can be found even for their useless products. The artist's work lies beyond the boundaries of the useful and the useless.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Effort, Painting

“And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
Leviathan (1651)

Men

“My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people-especially if the people are readers, book-buyers. It's a crafty bird and it wants to go where there aint no readers That's the truth: they go and paw a place all up and spoil it for me. It isn't my secret anymore.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher (27 February 1924), published in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

People, Truth, Secret, Books

“The most common cause of low prices is pessimism — some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1990 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1990.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Optimism, Business, Time

“In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants. Thus, one might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis. But in actual fact, classical economic theory did manage to sidestep the game-theoretic aspects of economic behavior by postulating perfect competition, i. e., by assuming that every buyer and every seller is very small as compared with the size of the relevant markets, so that nobody can significantly affect the existing market prices by his actions.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior, Game, Understanding, Perfection

“In industrial marketing settings, the relationship between buyer and seller is frequently long term, close and involving a complex pattern of interaction between and within each company. The marketers' and buyers' task in this case may have more to do with maintaining these relationships than with making a straightforward sale or purchase.”

Håkan Håkansson

H. Hakansson (1982), International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction Approach. London: John Wiley and Sons, p. 14; as cited in : Christian Homburg (2001, 16)

“Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Modern Scream (1975)

Truth, Past

“And you remember, Rabbi Wise has declared, in a heated moment, that our plays seem to be written for the hosiery buyers. If Dr. Wise had only witnessed our new summer reviews, he doubtless would have amended his statement to read “by the hosiery buyers.””

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 2: 1919, p.89

Reading, Summer

“In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops.”

Mark Slouka (1958) author

Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness

People, Business

“It's like a vicious cycle. How the hell could you turn around and be a buyer with all of this stuff going on?”

Jack Baker Head of equities at Putnam Lovell Securities

[Meghan, Collins, http://money.cnn.com/2003/02/13/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm, Stocks get war whiplash, CNNMoney.com, February 13, 2003, 2007-05-22]

Hell

“It is also worth noting that it is extremely difficult to be a great buyer of complementary competencies if you do not have any knowledge about the stuff you are acquiring. Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that a man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. We need knowledge to be able to outsource knowledge.”

Jonas Ridderstråle (1966) Swedish business theorist

Source: Karaoke Capitalism, 2005, p. 233

Knowledge

“The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.

In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

[2008-11-19, Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html]
2008

Fate, Cars

“The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 12 The New Laborers, p. 354.

“You recognize but one rule of commerce; that is (to avail myself of your own terms) to allow free passage and freedom of action to all buyers and sellers whoever they may be.”

François Quesnay (1694–1774) French economist

François Quesnay in letter from M. Alpha to de Quesnay, 1767; cited in: Antony Jay (2010). Lend Me Your Ears: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations. p. 253.

Freedom

“They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i. e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Interview in The Believer magazine, (July 2004) http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek

Life, Beauty, Music, Cars

“I got me slaves and slave-girls.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

Homilies on Ecclesiastes; Hall and Moriarty, trs., de Gruyter (New York, 1993) p. 74 https://books.google.com/books?id=BReXJwwE_D8C&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74.

God, Girl, Nature, Freedom

“The firm-as-portfolio model implies both a practice (growth through diversification) and a form (the conglomerate). Unrelated diversification entails buying businesses in industries that are neither potential buyers, suppliers, competitors, or complements to the firm’s current business.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 229

Business

“Early entry is appropriate when the following general circumstances hold:
- Image and reputation of the firm are important to the buyer, and the firm can develop an enhanced reputation by being a pioneer.
- Early entry can initiate the learning process in a business in which the learning curve is important, experience is difficult to imitate, and it will not be nullified by successive technological generations.
- Customer loyalty will be great, so that benefits will accrue to the firm that sells to the customer first.
- Absolute cost advantages can be gained by early commitment to supplies of raw materials, distribution channels, and so on.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

2008 edition, p. 248
Competitive strategy, 1980

Business, Learning, Success, Loyalty

“The whole question of pictures made to order is a darn peculiar form of merchandize. Buyers seem to like the tiresome MP blue, for one thing, and girls having a pleasant chat for another. They must look pleasant like Daybreak and Garden of Allah and not contemplative like Hilltop, Stars and Dreaming, which are not so popular …. There are countless artists whose shoes I'm not worthy to polish — whose prints would not pay the printer! … I'm beginning to doubt my judgment!”

Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) American painter and illustrator

Letter to A. E. Reinthal (15 February 1929)

Dreams, Shoe, Girl, Star

“Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter VI, The Crash, p. 104

“I'm asking Congress to pass my Zero Down Payment Initiative. We should remove the 3 percent down payment rule for first time home buyers with FHA-insured mortgages.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks to the National Association of Home Builders, Columbus, Ohio, October 2, 2004 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041002-7.html 2000s, 2004

Home, Time

“386. The buyer needes a hundred eyes, the seller not one.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VI

Women, Men, Money, Marriage

“2006, at least after August['s Vista release], will be great time for buyers and sellers of PC hardware and that has to be a good thing for everyone — except Apple.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Windows Vista: The Final Countdown Begins http://technewsworld.com/story/46149.html in Tech News World (19 September 2005)

Time

“But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the "hamburgers" they will soon be buying. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1997 Chairman's Letter
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Hope, Sense, Future, Happiness

“THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XX, Section 1, p. 219 (Caps as per text...)

“[In this auction we may expect the article to be sold to] "the most eager buyer at a price which is just about the highest he is willing to pay, for in this case the most eager buyer does not know what prices the other buyers are willing to give [and] … each buyer fear that someone may slip in ahead of him.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 42 as cited in: Vernon L. Smith (1991) Papers in Experimental Economics. p. 516

Fear

“A foreign visitor to the Berlin Stock Exchange would easily be deceived. There are announcements of daily quotations and price changes as though a free Stock Exchanged still existed, but nowhere would he find the former ‘public’— private buyers and sellers—as represented by independent brokers, bankers and ‘visitors.”

Günter Reimann (1904–2005) German economist

Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p. 178

Change

“Marketing management is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of programs designed to create, build, and maintain beneficial exchanges with target buyers for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives.”

Philip Kotler (1931) American marketing author, consultant and professor

Philip Kotler (1993), as cited in: Gerald A. Cole (2003), Strategic Management, p. 131

“The purchase of a bargain issue presupposes that the market's current appraisal is wrong, or at least that the buyer's idea of value is more likely to be right than the market's. In this process the investor sets his judgement against that of the market. To some this may seem arrogant or foolhardy.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 38

Idea

“The current emphasis on price policy, as against price, as a proper object of study represents recent economic reflection on the significance of expectations, uncertainties, market control, and the position of price as one among many selling terms. Policy implies some degree of control over the course of events and, at the same time, the use of judgment as to the probable consequences of alternative lines of action. In perfect markets, whether monopolistic or competitive, price is hardly a matter of judgment and where there is no judgment there is no policy. The area of price policy, then, embraces the deliberative action of buyers and sellers able to influence price; that is to say, it covers practically the whole field of industrial prices.”

Edward S. Mason (1899–1992) American economist

Source: "Price and production policies of large-scale enterprise," 1939, p. 61

Study, Time, Perfection

“It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Memoirs, Falling Towards England (1985)

People, Shoe, Thinking, Sport

“I was totally star-struck as a youngster and incredibly shy, but I loved the theatre – especially pantomimes. After a failed audition for RADA, I worked as a trainee fashion buyer at Harrods, where they had an entertainments society and I performed in several of its productions. I took singing lessons and my teacher encouraged me to read The Stage, where I saw that chorus singers were needed for the musical The Belle Of New York. I got the job – much to my parents’ horror, who wanted me to keep my respectable job, but I was determined to become an actress.”

Valerie Leon (1943) English actress

Whatever happened to Bond Girl Valerie Leon? http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/614933/Bond-Girl-Valerie-Leon-career-life (November 2, 2015)

Love, Music, Star, Fashion

“Muhammad bin Tughlaq became notorious for enslaving captives, and his reputation in this regard spread far and wide… Ibn Battuta’s eye-witness account of the Sultan’s arranging marriages of enslaved girls with Muslims on a large scale on the two Ids confirms the statement of Al Umri. “First of all,” writes he, “daughters of Kafir (Hindu) Rajas captured during the course of the year, come, sing and dance. Thereafter they are bestowed upon Amirs and important foreigners. After this the daughters of other Kafirs dance and sing… the Sultan gives them to his brothers, relatives sons of Maliks etc. On the sixth day male and female slaves are married.” It was a general practice for Hindu girls of good families to learn the art of dancing. It was a sort of religious rite. They used to dance during weddings, festivals and Pujas at home and in temples. This art was turned ravenous under their Muslim captors or buyers.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Masalik-ul-Absar, E and D, III, p. 580. Ibn Battuta, p. 63, Hindi version by S.A.A. Rizvi in Tughlaq Kalin Bharat, Part I, Aligarh, p. 189. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

Marriage, Family, Art, Home

“Every possible buyer of an immaterial pictorial sensitivity zone must realize that the fact that he accepts a receipt for the price which he has payed takes away all authentic immaterial value from the work, although it is in his possession. In order that the fundamental immaterial value of the zone belong to him and become a part of him, he must solemnly burn his receipt, after his first and last name, his address and the date of the purchase have been written on the stub of the receipt book.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Source: before 1960, Ritual for the Relinquishment of the immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zones', Yves Klein, 1957-59, p. 207

Books, Parting

“Value innovation is created in the region where a company's actions favorably affect both its cost structure and its value proposition to buyers. Cost saving are made by eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economics kick in due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates.”

W. Chan Kim book Blue Ocean Strategy

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy, 2005, p. 15

Time

“If you look at what's going on in terms of unity, the Bernie people are angry. They're angry. He was angry. What was amazing to me is when she was talking about Bernie last night, the camera was on him and he was angry. It almost looks like he has buyer's remorse, like he shouldn't have made the deal.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

People, Night

“A man being sued after a woman has more sex than intended is like Lay’s being sued after someone has more potato chips than intended. In brief, date rape can be a crime, a misunderstanding, or buyer’s remorse.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 312.

Sex

“In the office there are about fifteen people whose attention is directed toward a table covered with the costly fabric [raw cotton]; one man is bent over the table and another is sort of seating on it – the buyer and the broker are discussing a sample. A painting of a vernacular subject, if there is such a thing, and I think by a better hand than most others (a size 40 canvas, I think). I'm planning another less complicated and more surprising yet, better art, in which everyone is in summer dress, the walls white, and a sea of cotton on the tables. (translation based on M. Kay's, in M. Gérin [ed. ] and M. Kay, transl. 'Degas letters', Oxford, 1947, pp. 29-30, no. 2”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote in Gegas letter to his friend James Tissot, New Orleans, 18 February 1873; as quoted in 'Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition', Anne Distel, Michel Hoog, Charles S. Moffett, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, N.Y.) 1975, p. 99 Degas is referring to his painting 'Cotton Merchants in New Orleans' [Cotton Merchants in New Orleans https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/299832, (1873) 1855 - 1875

People, Art, Thinking, Summer

“This study compares the agency theory of the firm with interorganizational theory in examining the factors associated with the adoption of the poison pill-a takeover defense issued by a firm's board of directors that can dramatically increase the cost that a hostile buyer would have to pay to acquire the firm-by a panel of Fortune 500 firms between July 1984 and August 1989. The pill's rapid spread is traced to a combination of ownership structure and other firm-level factors and an interlock network diffusion process. The results support a social structural perspective on the market for corporate control in which the interlock network provides a social context favoring continued managerial dominance. The findings are also more consistent with models of cohesion rather than structural equivalence as the social structural mechanism responsible for diffusion.”

Gerald F. Davis (1961) American sociologist

Source: "Agents without principles?" 1991, p. 538 ; Abstract

Hostility, Support, Study

“Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
Playboy: Meaning what?
Jobs: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, as quoted in “Steve Jobs Imagines 'Nationwide' Internet in 1985 Interview” https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-imagines-nationwide-internet-in-1985-intervi-1671246589, Matt Novak, 12/15/14 2:20pm Paleofuture, Gizmodo. 1980s

People, World, Faith, Way

“A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Age, Confidence

“It is because prices are stable, and are perceived by agents to be in equilibrium, that the task facing market institutions is less daunting in this respect. However, market institutions may still have many other functions, such as providing information regarding quality and the location of potential buyers and sellers, and regulating both the product and the entrants to the market. In fact, a crucial function may be more subtle; by ordering trade under the aegis of some institution, the price and quality of the product may be legitimized at its given level. There is a kind of stamp of institutional approval which may contribute in a powerful manner to the emergence of price norms…..”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 185-6

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups. Conservatives and libertarians should fight back and challenge the myth that collectivist liberals care more about racism. Modern liberalism, however, well-intentioned, is a byproduct of the same collectivist thinking that characterizes racism. The continued insistence on group thinking only inflames racial tensions. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees- while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers. More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct what is essentially a sin of the heart, we should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

What Really Divides Us https://web.archive.org/web/20120127094927/http://www.ronpaularchive.com/2002/12/what-really-divides-us/ (23 December 2002). 2000s, 2001-2005

Color, Understanding, Business, Thinking

“We shall here define the market as a set of social institutions in which a large number of commodity exchanges of a specific type regularly take place, and to some extent are facilitated and structured by those institutions. Exchange as defined above, involves contractual agreement and the exchange of property rights, and the market consists in part of mechanisms to structure, organize and legitimate these activities. Markets, in short, are organized and institutionalized exchange. Stress is placed on those market institutions, which help to both regulate and establish a consensus over prices and, more generally, to communicate information regarding products, prices, quantities, potential buyers and potential sellers.”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 174

Communication, Help, Parting

“Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective — economic value, anyway — while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Ceres, Chapter Eighteen http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?page_id=235, 2009.

Law, Question

“The economy is not in our [i. e. black] hands, we are not in control of economic power. We have identified the weaknesses in [land reform]. Willing buyer, willing seller did not work. It made the state’s price tag an unfair process. In addition there are many laws dealing with land which cause confusion and delays. … Land hunger is real.”

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

On 3 March 2017 during his annual address to the National House of Traditional Leaders, Zuma wants ‘black parties’ to unite on land issue https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1446107/zuma-wants-black-parties-unite-land-issue/, Citizen reporter (3 March 2017)

Hunger, Law

“The more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Two Kinds Of Judgment", April 2007

People

“A market is a group of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service. The buyers as a group determine the demand for the product, and the sellers as a group determine the supply of the product. Markets take many forms. Some markets are highly organized, such as the markets for many agricultural commodities. In these markets, buyers and sellers meet at a specific time and place, where an auctioneer helps set prices and arrange sales. More often, markets are less organized.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

Source: Principles of Economics (1998-), Ch. 4. The Market Forces of Supply and Demand; p. 66

Time, Help

“In case the buyer wishes this act of integration of the work of art with himself to take place, Yves Klein must.... plus two witness, throw half of the gold received in the ocean, into a river or in some place of nature where this gold cannot be retrieved by anyone. From this moment on, the immaterial pictorial sensitivity zone belongs to the buyer absolutely and intrinsically.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Source: before 1960, Ritual for the Relinquishment of the immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zones', Yves Klein, 1957-59, p. 207

Art, Nature

“The point is that whatever price a transaction is transacted at represents a meeting of the mind of both buyer and seller. Both viewed themselves as being better off than the next alternative -- not making the transaction.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

1970s, Economics for the Citizen (1978)
Context: there's the claim that this or that price is unreasonable. I used to have conversations about this claim with Mrs. Williams early on in our 44-year marriage. She'd return from shopping complaining that stores were charging unreasonable prices. Having aired her complaints, she'd ask me to go out and unload a car trunk loaded with groceries and other items. Having completed the chore, I'd resume our conversation, saying, "Honey, I thought you said the prices were unreasonable. Are you an unreasonable person? Only an unreasonable person would pay unreasonable prices." The long and short of it is that the conversation never went over well, and we both ceased discussions of reasonable or unreasonable prices. The point is that whatever price a transaction is transacted at represents a meeting of the mind of both buyer and seller. Both viewed themselves as being better off than the next alternative -- not making the transaction. That's not to say that the seller wouldn't have found a higher price more pleasing or the buyer wouldn't have been pleased with a lower price.

Valerie Leon (1943) English actress

I got the job – much to my parents’ horror, who wanted me to keep my respectable job, but I was determined to become an actress. Whatever happened to Bond Girl Valerie Leon? http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/614933/Bond-Girl-Valerie-Leon-career-life (November 2, 2015)

Singing, Reading, Star, Teachers

“The merchant sends the buyer far afield with instructions to invest... in... staples or novelties, as he thinks will interest the home public. He risks his money and a certain amount of prestige upon the judgment of the buyer... Much merchandise begins to depreciate from the day it arrives; practically none increases in value. The buyer then must learn to buy enough and not too much; to buy what will give satisfaction..; to pay not too much for what he buys; to know qualities and values... All this carries with it a certain speculative risk, but so certain does his judgment become, that the house conducted on scientific lines can estimate to a fraction of one per cent.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

Money, Home, Housing, Learning

“[T]he artist sells the work of his brush and in this he is a merchant. The writer sells to any who will buy, let his ideas be what they will. The teacher sells his knowledge of books—often in too low a market—to those who would have this knowledge passed on to the young.
The doctor... too is a merchant. His stock-in-trade is his intimate knowledge of the physical man and his skill to prevent or remove disabilities. ...The lawyer sometimes knows the laws of the land and sometimes does not, but he sells his legal language, often accompanied by common sense, to the multitude who have not yet learned that a contentious nature may squander quite as successfully as the spendthrift. The statesman sells his knowledge of men and affairs, and the spoken or written exposition of his principles of Government; and he receives in return the satisfaction of doing what he can for his nation, and occasionally wins as well a niche in its temple of fame.
The man possessing many lands, he especially would be a merchant... and sell, but his is a merchandise which too often nowadays waits in vain for the buyer. The preacher, the lecturer, the actor, the estate agent, the farmer, the employé, all, all are merchants, all have something to dispose of at a profit to themselves, and the dignity of the business is decided by the manner in which they conduct the sale.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), Concerning Commerce

Waiting, Law, Business, Learning

“The rise of liberalism was accompanied by immense technological progress; by the industrial revolution; by the division of labor which ensued, and which suddenly, and prodigiously, accelerated the efficiency of production; and by the conception of economic life governed by the market. In other words, of economic life governed by the buyer, not the seller. This was a brand-new and wholly revolutionary idea.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 65-66

Idea, Life