Quotes about cost
page 5

Dana Gioia photo
Mo Yan photo
Robert Costanza photo
Lin Yutang photo

“On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.”

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 153. Often quoted as: "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."

Erik Naggum photo

“Note that ANSI standards also cost way too much compared to toilet paper, and they're pretty bad quality as toilet paper goes, too.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: free lisp compilers? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/bb2f0a85c0cbf782 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Winston S. Churchill photo

“We have differed and quarrelled in the past but now one bond unites us all—to wage war until victory is won, and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony must be.”

Broadcast (19 May 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 364
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Gary Gygax photo

“A country cannot be defeated politically unless it is defeated culturally. Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism - cultural India's name at its deepest and highest, and the principle of its identity, continuity and reawakening. Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack. They began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes…. The long period created an atmosphere of mental slavery and imitation. It created a class of people Hindu in their names and by birth but anti-Hindu in orientation, sympathy and loyalty. They knew all the bad things and nothing good about Hinduism. Hindu dharma is now being subverted from within. Anti-Hindu Hindus are very important today; they rule the roost; they write our histories, they define our nation; they control the media, the academia, the politics, the higher administration and higher courts. They are now working as clients of those forces who are planning to revive their old Imperialism… During this period our minds became soft. We became escapists; we wanted to avoid conflict at any cost, even conflict and controversy of ideas, even when this controversy was necessary. We developed an escape-route. We called it "synthesis". We said all religions, all scriptures, all prophets preach the same things. It was intellectual surrender, and our enemies saw it that way; they concluded that we are amenable to anything, that we would clutch at any false hope or idea to avoid a struggle, and that we would do nothing to defend ourselves. Therefore, they have become even more aggressive. It also shows that we have lost spiritual discrimination (viveka), and would entertain any falsehood; this is prajñâ-dosha, drishti-dosha, and it cannot be good for our survival in the long run. People first fall into delusion before they fall into misfortune.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Su Tseng-chang photo

“Democracy and security do not fall from heaven — they come with a cost.”

Su Tseng-chang (1947) Taiwanese politician

Su Tseng-chang (2013) cited in " DPP fully committed to Taiwan’s self-defense, Su says http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/06/15/2003564827" on The Taipei Times, 15 June 2013.

David Boaz photo
Tjalling Koopmans photo
Lin Yutang photo
Steven Erikson photo
John Dickinson photo
Francis Escudero photo
Loke Siew Fook photo

“As everyone knows, we (Malaysia) are in a very tight financial situation. Our yearly development budget is very limited. Every airport (in Malaysia) needs expansion. It will definitely cost the government a lot of money to upgrade or development airports. However, infrastructure projects must go on. We will look into ways to work on this plan. We will answer it when the government decides its ways forward.”

Loke Siew Fook (1976) Malaysian politician

Loke Siew Fook (2018) cited in " Government to decide financing model for airports upgrade by year end https://www.nst.com.my/business/2018/09/413597/government-decide-financing-model-airports-upgrade-year-end" on The Straits Times, 21 September 2018

Aron Ra photo

“There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”. I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the televangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out. But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent. So there’s nothing to stop them. Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned… Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes. They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Rex Tillerson photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo
George Herbert photo

“155. Good words are worth much, and cost little.”

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

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Steve Keen photo

“Which comes first — price being set by the intersection of supply and demand, or individual firms equating marginal cost to price?”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 4, Size Does Matter, p. 101

William F. Buckley Jr. photo
Charles Fort photo
Wanda Orlikowski photo
Daniel Dennett photo

“Here is a well-known trajectory: You begin with a heartfelt desire to help other people and the conviction, however well or ill founded, that your guild or club or church is the coalition that can best serve to improve the welfare of others. If times are particularly tough, this conditional stewardship — I'm doing what's good for the guild because that will be good for everybody — may be displaced by the narrowest concern for the integrity of the guild itself, and for good reason: if you believe that the institution in question is the best path to goodness, the goal of preserving it for future projects, still unimagined, can be the most rational higher goal you can define. It is a short step from this to losing track of or even forgetting the larger purpose and devoting yourself singlemindedly to furthering the interests of the institution, at whatever costs. A conditional or instrumental allegiance can thus become indistinguishable in practice from a commitment to something "good in itself." A further short step perverts this parochial summum bonum to the more selfish goal of doing whatever it takes to keep yourself at the helm of the institution ("who better than I to lead us to triumph over our adversaries?")We have all seen this happen many times, and may even have caught ourselves in the act of forgetting just why we wanted to be leaders in the first place.”

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Walter Bagehot photo
Paulo Freire photo

“The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

James Inhofe photo

“Do you realize I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this? I thought it must be true until I found out what it would cost.”

James Inhofe (1934) American politician

2012-03-15
The Rachel Maddow Show
MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46762101/
on hearing about climate change as chair of the Senate Environment Committee

Albert Barnes photo
George W. Bush photo
Francis Escudero photo

“We sign a contract for a North Rail that cost $17 million per kilometer while the equivalent cost in Shanghai is $7M.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Bill Clinton photo
Joe Higgins photo

“In view of the fact that the Royal Family of Britain is one of the wealthiest families in the world and this country is almost sleeping rough, so to speak, figuratively, would you ask the Queen if she might make a contribution towards her own bed and breakfast costs to assist the unfortunate taxpayers, and go easier on them?”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

JOE http://joe.ie/news-politics/current-affairs/td-joe-higgins-says-queen-should-pay-bed-and-breakfast-for-visit-0011580-1, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/16/ireland.uk.queen.higgins/

Noam Chomsky photo
Hakim Bey photo
Edward R. Murrow photo
David Lloyd George photo

“A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On the peers of the House of Lords, in a speech in Newcastle (9 October 1909), quoted in printed in the Manchester Guardian http://books.google.com/books?id=pDzmAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1049 (11 October 1909)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Bob Dylan photo

“People starving and thirsting; grain elevators are bursting. You know, it costs more to store the food than it do to give it.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), Slow Train

Steven Erikson photo
Pasquier Quesnel photo

“People want to be Christians too cheaply, and consequently they are not Christians at all. Salvation has to cost, it has to cost everything, at least as far as the disposition of the heart is concerned.”

Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719) French theologian

Pensées, p. 47, as translated by Mary Ilford in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), p. 84

“Let's consider first Hayek's claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.
It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism's great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.
This isn't to say that virtue makes no difference to what returns one may expect for one's productive contributions. The exercise of prudence and foresight in laying out one's production and investment plans, and diligence in carrying them out, generally improves one's odds. But sheer dumb luck is also, ineradicably, a prominent factor determining free market returns. And nobody deserves what comes to them by sheer luck.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

Hermann Hesse photo
Mark Mwandosya photo

“What is the cost of the pride of the nation? The number does not mean anything as long as we buy the plane, maintain it and look after the welfare of our people.”

Mark Mwandosya (1949) Tanzanian politician

Defending the purchase of the presidential jet when he was the Minister of Transport. 2004-10-06 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3719712.stm

Richard Rumelt photo
George Dantzig photo

“One of the first applications of the simplex algorithm was to the determination of an adequate diet that was of least cost. In the fall of 1947, Jack Laderman of the Mathematical Tables Project of the National Bureau of Standards undertook, as a test of the newly proposed simplex method, the first large-scale computation in this field. It was a system with nine equations in seventy-seven unknowns. Using hand-operated desk calculators, approximately 120 man-days were required to obtain a solution. … The particular problem solved was one which had been studied earlier by George Stigler (who later became a Nobel Laureate) who proposed a solution based on the substitution of certain foods by others which gave more nutrition per dollar. He then examined a "handful" of the possible 510 ways to combine the selected foods. He did not claim the solution to be the cheapest but gave his reasons for believing that the cost per annum could not be reduced by more than a few dollars. Indeed, it turned out that Stigler's solution (expressed in 1945 dollars) was only 24 cents higher than the true minimum per year $39.69.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

cited in: John J. O'Connor & Edmund F.; Robertson (2003) " George Dantzig http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Dantzig_George.html". in: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
Linear programming and extensions (1963)

Woodrow Wilson photo
Francis Escudero photo

“While we simply see the provisions, he would see the costs hidden in each section, and then proceed to remind us of their burden to taxpayers.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2013, Speech: Nomination of Senator Ralph Recto as Senate Pro Tempore

Benjamin Graham photo

“The money cost of the reservoir plan literally fades into insignificance when it is compared with the financial burden which the great depression imposed on the nation.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part II, Chapter IX, The Cost of the Reservoir Plan, p. 114
Storage and Stability (1937)

“Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Book I, opening lines
Translations, Iliad (1997)

Daniel Berrigan photo

“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm… in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”

Daniel Berrigan (1921–2016) American Catholic priest, peace activist, and poet

No Bars to Manhood (1971), p. 49.

Louis Hémon photo
Daniel McCallum photo
Henry Adams photo

“…not one rebel defection — not even Robert E. Lee's — cost young Adams a personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Frederick Douglass photo

“This war, let it be long or let it be short, let it cost much or let it cost little… shall not cease until every freedman at the South has the right to vote.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

Nouriel Roubini photo

“The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown.”

Nouriel Roubini (1958) American economist

"RGE Conference Call on the Economic and Financial Outlook... and why the Treasury TARP bailout is flawed," http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/253762/rge_conference_call_on_the_economic_and_financial_outlookand_why_the_treasury_tarp_bailout_is_flawed RGE Monitor (2008-09-26).

Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“We would fight against terrorism and win at any cost.”

Ameer Haider Khan Hoti (1971) politician in Pakistan

Hoti's address to the media on Independence Day http://www.geo.tv/8-14-2009/47603.htm, Peshawar (2009-08-14).

“Organizational design often focuses on structural alternatives such as matrix, decentralization, and divisionalization. However, control variables (e. g., reward structures, task characteristics, and information systems) offer a more flexible approach. The purpose of this paper is to explore these control variables for organizational design. This is accomplished by integration and testing of two perspectives, organization theory and economics, notably agency theory. The resulting hypotheses link task characteristics, information systems, and business uncertainty to behavior vs. outcome based control strategy. These hypothesized linkages are examined empirically in a field study of the compensation practices for retail salespeople in 54 stores. The findings are that task programmability is strongly related to the choice of compensation package. The amount of behavioral measurement, the cost of measuring outcomes, and the uncertainty of the business also affect compensation. The findings have management implications for the design of compensation and reward packages, performance evaluation systems, and control systems, in general. Such systems should explicitly consider the task, the information system in place to measure performance, and the riskiness of the business. More programmed tasks require behavior based controls while less programmed tasks require more elaborate information systems or outcome based controls.”

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt American economist

Source: "Control: Organizational and economic approaches," 1985, p. 134; Article abstract

Friedrich Engels photo
Ben Elton photo
Norman Mailer photo
Thorstein Veblen photo
Condoleezza Rice photo
Adrienne Rich photo
David Pogue photo
Ernest Bramah photo

“Better a dish of husks to the accompaniment of a muted lute than to be satiated with stewed shark's fin and rich spiced wine of which the cost is frequently mentioned by the provider.”

The Story of the Poet Lao Ping, Chun Shin's Daughter Fa, and the Fighting Crickets
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree (1940)

John of St. Samson photo
Harold Demsetz photo
Susan Sontag photo
William the Silent photo

“As in the beginning, so now, and it will be for ever after, we come of a race who are very bad managers in youth, though we improve as we get older. I have cut down the cost of my falconers to 1200 florins, and I hope soon to be out of debt.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

William writing to his brother Louis, as quoted in William the Silent (1897) by Frederic Harrison, p. 10

Anita Sarkeesian photo

“For this video I tried to get a glimpse of Batman's rear end, but it's as if his cape is a piece of high-tech Wayne-Industries equipment designed to cover up his butt at all costs.”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

<i>Strategic Butt Coverings (Jan 19, 2016)</i>
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (Feminist Frequency, 2013 - 2015)

George Chapman photo
William Binney photo

“This approach costs lives, and has cost lives in Britain because it inundates analysts with too much data. It is 99% useless. Who wants to know everyone who has ever [been] at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts”

William Binney former U.S. intelligence official and cryptoanalyst; whistleblower

Snooper's charter' will cost British lives, MPs are warned ' http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/snoopers-charter-will-cost-british-lives-mps-warned, published by The Guardian on 6th January 2016.

Marie-Louise von Franz photo
Andrew Bacevich photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“The system of transportation is not coherent; it is not treated as integral. Roads compete with with railroads and airlines in chaotic fashion, and at immense cost to the nation.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 7, Automation and Such, p. 186.

“In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is.”

Jeffrey St. Clair (1959) American journalist

The Making of Halliburton https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/07/14/the-making-of-halliburton/ (July 14, 2005), CounterPunch.

Frank Chodorov photo
Joseph Massad photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance under which Chinese Labour is now being carried on do not, in my opinion, constitute a state of slavery. A labour contract into which men enter voluntarily for a limited and for a brief period, under which they are paid wages which they consider adequate, under which they are not bought or sold and from which they can obtain relief on payment of seventeen pounds ten shillings, the cost of their passage, may not be a healthy or proper contract, but it cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In the House of Commons, February 22, 1906 "King’s Speech (Motion for an Address)" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1906/feb/22/kings-speech-motion-for-an-address#column_555, as Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office, repeating what he had said during the 1906 election campaign. This is the original context for terminological inexactitude, used simply literally, whereas later the term took on the sense of a euphemism or circumlocution for a lie. As quoted in Sayings of the Century (1984) by Nigel Rees.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Robert X. Cringely photo

“If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.”

Robert X. Cringely (1953) American technology journalist and columnist

Robert X. Cringely (1989), "Noted from the field" in: InfoWorld magazine, Vol. 11, nr. 10, March 6, 1989, p. 94

Jeremy Rifkin photo
Alfred de Zayas photo
Alexander H. Stephens photo

“Again, the subject of internal improvements, under the power of Congress to regulate commerce, is put at rest under our system. The power, claimed by construction under the old constitution, was at least a doubtful one; it rested solely upon construction. We of the South, generally apart from considerations of constitutional principles, opposed its exercise upon grounds of its inexpediency and injustice. Notwithstanding this opposition, millions of money, from the common treasury had been drawn for such purposes. Our opposition sprang from no hostility to commerce, or to all necessary aids for facilitating it. With us it was simply a question upon whom the burden should fall. In Georgia, for instance, we have done as much for the cause of internal improvements as any other portion of the country, according to population and means. We have stretched out lines of railroads from the seaboard to the mountains; dug down the hills, and filled up the valleys at a cost of not less than $25,000,000. All this was done to open an outlet for our products of the interior, and those to the west of us, to reach the marts of the world. No State was in greater need of such facilities than Georgia, but we did not ask that these works should be made by appropriations out of the common treasury. The cost of the grading, the superstructure, and the equipment of our roads was borne by those who had entered into the enterprise. Nay, more not only the cost of the iron no small item in the aggregate cost was borne in the same way, but we were compelled to pay into the common treasury several millions of dollars for the privilege of importing the iron, after the price was paid for it abroad. What justice was there in taking this money, which our people paid into the common treasury on the importation of our iron, and applying it to the improvement of rivers and harbors elsewhere? The true principle is to subject the commerce of every locality, to whatever burdens may be necessary to facilitate it. If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah river has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden. So with the mouths of the Alabama and Mississippi river. Just as the products of the interior, our cotton, wheat, corn, and other articles, have to bear the necessary rates of freight over our railroads to reach the seas. This is again the broad principle of perfect equality and justice, and it is especially set forth and established in our new constitution.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

José Ortega Y Gasset photo