Quotes about price
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“The top secret "M Device", an exploding shell containing a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine. The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it "the most effective chemical weapon ever devised". Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price, was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. "If you got home only once with the gas you would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda."The cabinet was hostile to the use of such weapons, much to Churchill's irritation. He also wanted to use M Devices against the rebellious tribes of northern India. "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he declared in one secret memorandum.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), .

Hostility, Secret, Home

“1090. Cheat me in the Price, but not in the Goods.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Cheating

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Footnote - The very remarkable speeches of Mr. Garfield, afterward President of the United States, which had so great an influence on the settlement of the inflation question throughout the Union, were on the main lines laid down in Turgot's letter
Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 171

Fear, Time, Country

“Market economy implies a self-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices.”

Karl Polanyi book The Great Transformation

The Great Transformation (1944), Ch. 4 : Societies and Economic Systems

“The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy’s debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the ‘real’ economy’s ability to carry this debt. … The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Financial Capitalism v. Industrial Capitalism http://michael-hudson.com/1998/09/financial-capitalism-v-industrial-capitalism/ (September 3, 1998) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

Lie, Problem

“More than a decade after the Shah's death it is no longer necessary to be for or against him on all matters. How could one be for or against everything that happened during a reign of nearly thirty-eight years? How could Iranians not be for him when he fought over Azerbaijan or when he gave the royal assent to the bill that nationalised Iran's oil? How could one be against the principle of land reform or the enhancement of women's status? And did he not deserve support when he fought for a more just system of production and pricing for oil, which he called 'a noble substance'? But how could anyone be for him when he closed all doors on discussion and debate and effectively drove many intelligent and patriotic Iranians into the arms of reactionary mullahs? And how could one approve of the unchecked intervention of the SAVAK secret police in virtually all aspects of life, especially in the 1970s? Last but not least, it would be difficult to understand, much less to justify, his almost pathological belief that only the major powers were capable of either protecting or destabilising his regime.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Life, Death, Women, Secret

“One of the common means by which one nation exploits another and one that is relevant to Africa’s external relations is exploitation through trade. When the terms of trade are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then the trade is usually detrimental to the trading partner. To be specific, one can take the export of agricultural produce from Africa and the import of manufactured goods into Africa from Europe, North America, and Japan. The big nations establish the price of the agricultural products and subject these prices to frequent reductions. At the same time the price of manufactured goods is also set by them, along with the freight rates necessary for trade in the ships of those nations. The minerals of Africa also fall into the same category as agricultural produce as far as pricing is concerned. The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 38.

Time, Country

“The American people have been offered two lousy choices. One, which is corporatism, a fascist type of approach, or, socialism. We deliver a lot of services in this country through the free market, and when you do it through the free market prices go down. But in medicine, prices go up. Technology doesn't help the cost, it goes up instead of down. But if you look at almost all of our industries that are much freer, technology lowers the prices. Just think of how the price of cell phones goes down. Poor people have cell phones, and televisions, and computers. Prices all go down. But in medicine, they go up, and there's a reason for that, that's because the government is involved with it… I do [think that prices will go down without government involvement], but probably a lot more than what you're thinking about, because you have to have competition in the delivery of care. For instance, if you have a sore throat and you have to come see me, you have to wait in the waiting room, and then get checked, and then get a prescription, and it ends up costing you $100. If you had true competition, you should be able to go to a nurse, who could for 1/10 the cost very rapidly do it, and let her give you a prescription for penicillin. See, the doctors and the medical profession have monopolized the system through licensing. And that's not an accident, because they like the idea that you have to go see the physician and pay this huge price. And patients can sort this out, they're not going to go to a nurse if they need brain surgery…”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Idea, Thinking, Waiting

“The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how well it functions until it is prevented from functioning, and even then we seldom recognize the source of the trouble.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 1 "The Power of the Market", p. 14

Time

“If a product doesn't sell, raise the price.”

Reese Palley (1922–2015)

“In 1913, Nobel price Otto Heinrich Warburg was the first to observe that cancer can not develop in a rich stace full of oxygen. Nobel price Roy Walford also observed that caloric restriction, could increase longevity and health.”

Jean-Pierre Willem (1938) French humanitarian

Dès 1913, le prix Nobel Otto Heinrich Warburg fut le premier à observer et expliquer que le cancer ne peut se développer dans un milieu riche en oxygène, donc acide. Le prix Nobel Roy Walford observa également que les restrictions caloriques pouvaient augmenter la longevité et la santé.
Une technique de jeûne annuel: L'ACIDOSE, prévention n°1 des maladies dégénératives, Jean-Pierre Willem (Paris, La vie naturelle, 1990), n°56.

Health

“When what I believe is the truth, I must act on it. But, I consider that you have every right to think what you think is the truth. I pay a price for adhering to my truth. I pay and do it cheerfully.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

Morarji Desai speaks about life and celibacy

Truth, Thinking

“Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Five, Accidental Capitalists, p. 107

Beauty, Home, Summer, Personality

“We could not guard every water pipeline from being blown up and every tree from being uprooted. We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying... It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce 'the policy of strength' toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

The Iron Wall (1999)

Family, Communication, Thinking, Tree

“In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts… People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxxii

Life, People, World, Art

“The film studios learned to our dismay but to their pleasure that if they spent $200 million making a film they could make half a billion on it. So they were not interested anymore in quality films… They can’t afford to be that risky at those prices. Consequently you’re getting a lot of remakes, sequels, dopey comedies full of toilet jokes…”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

BBC radio interview (2011) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef-JHO9BoJM.

Pleasure, Learning

“The master of a private dwelling will not allow any untidiness or unseemliness to be seen in the house, such as a couch upset, or the table littered with rubbish, or vessels of price thrown away into dirty corners, while those which serve ignobler uses are thrust forward for entering guests to see. He has everything arranged neatly and in the proper place, where it stands to most advantage; and then he can welcome his guests, without any misgivings that he need be ashamed of opening the interior of his house to receive them. The same duty, I take it, is incumbent on that master of our "tabernacle," the mind; it has to arrange everything within us, and to put each particular faculty of the soul, which the Creator has fashioned to be our implement or our vessel, to fitting and noble uses.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 18

Soul, Fashion, Housing

“Badlands, you gotta live it everyday.
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you've gotta pay.
We'll keep pushin' till it's understood
And these badlands start treating us good.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Badlands"
Song lyrics, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

Heart

“I will have to leave for Paris as soon as you return. I did two drawings [black on paper] with pen and in little dots - a 'Little Market' and a 'St. Martin (Pig dealers)'. It would be a good thing if I could sell them to some newspaper, that would bring us a few pennies… I still don't know what I am going to do, for Heymann seems completely indifferent. He probably knows my position and naturally is waiting for me to reduce my prices, just as Durand did last time… If we could place these we could get a few cents while waiting for this terrible month of January to pass… These drawings matted look very well.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, in a letter, Paris, 5 December 1886, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 86
1880's

Nature, Time, Waiting, Drawing

“If we re-elect Bush, we are endorsing the Bush doctrine. And then we are off to a vicious circle of escalating violence in the world. And I think, you know, terrorism, counter-terrorism, it's a very scary spectacle to me. If we reject him, then we are effectively rejecting the Bush doctrine. Because he was elected on a platform of a more humble foreign policy. Then we can go back to a more humble foreign policy. And treat this episode as an aberration. We have to pay a heavy price. You know, 100 billion dollars a year in Iraq. We can't get out of that. We mustn't get out of it. But still, we can then regain the confidence of the world, and our rightful place as leaders of the world, working to make the world a better place.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Interview with David Brancaccio (2003)

World, Confidence, Thinking

“What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.”

Elizabeth Bibesco (1897–1945) writer, actress; Romanian princess

Haven (1951)

“Does he concede that the whole basis of the Maastricht treaty is the establishment of a European central bank which is staffed by bankers, independent of national Governments and national economic policies, and whose sole policy is the maintenance of price stability? That will undermine any social objective that any Labour Government in the United Kingdom—or any other Government—would wish to carry out. Does my hon. Friend recognise that the imposition of a bankers' Europe on the people of this continent will endanger the cause of socialism in the United Kingdom and in any other country?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/jan/13/treaty-on-european-union-1 in the House of Commons (13 January 1993). 1990s

People, Country

“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

“I do not mean to suggest that all those who call themselves monetarists make this unconscious assumption that an inflation involves this uniform rise of prices. But we may distinguish two schools of monetarism. The first would prescribe a monthly or annual increase in the stock of money just sufficient, in their judgment, to keep prices stable. The second school (which the first might dismiss as mere inflationists) wants a continuous increase in the stock of money sufficient to raise prices steadily by a "small" amount—2 or 3 per cent a year. These are the advocates of a "creeping" inflation. … I made a distinction earlier between the monetarists strictly so called and the "creeping inflationists." This distinction applies to the intent of their recommended policies rather than to the result. The intent of the monetarists is not to keep raising the price "level" but simply to keep it from falling, i. e., simply to keep it "stable." But it is impossible to know in advance precisely what uniform rate of money-supply increase would in fact do this. The monetarists are right in assuming that in a prospering economy, if the stock of money were not increased, there would probably be a mild long-run tendency for prices to decline. But they are wrong in assuming that this would necessarily threaten employment or production. For in a free and flexible economy prices would be falling because productivity was increasing, that is, because costs of production were falling. There would be no necessary reduction in real profit margins. The American economy has often been prosperous in the past over periods when prices were declining. Though money wage-rates may not increase in such periods, their purchasing power does increase. So there is no need to keep increasing the stock of money to prevent prices from declining. A fixed arbitrary annual increase in the money stock "to keep prices stable" could easily lead to a "creeping inflation" of prices.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

Where the Monetarists Go Wrong (1976)

Money, School, Past

“The quantity of money, which is readily parted with to obtain a thing is called its price.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter I, p. 61

Money, Parting

“Think of the firm as a gigantic tub of whole milk. The farmer can sell the whole milk as it is. Or he can separate out the cream, and sell it at a considerably higher price than the whole milk would bring. (Selling cream is the analog of a firm selling debt securities, which pay a contractual return.) But, of course, what the farmer would have left would be skim milk, with low butter-fat content, and that would sell for much less than whole milk. (Skim milk corresponds to the levered equity.) The Modigliani-Miller proposition says that if there were no cost of separation (and, of course, no government dairy support program), the cream plus the skim milk would bring the same price as the whole milk.”

Merton Miller (1923–2000) American economist

Merton Miller. Financial Innovations and Market Volatility, 1991. p. 269; as cited in [Merton H. Miller (1923–2000), http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Miller.html, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2nd, Library of Economics and Liberty, Liberty Fund, 2008]

Support, Thinking

“It was a great experience. Unfortunately those days are over. Nowadays, you seldom see an artist listening to another artiste. Also, the sangeet jalsas, would go on for hours. I remember the tickets were priced at 50 paise for sitting on the ground and a rupee for a chair! All this may sound quaint today.”

Gangubai Hangal (1913–2009) Indian singer

On her grand old days of the All India Music Conference, which were the best in the music world quoted in "On Gangubai Hangal by Sabina Sehgal Computer Science & Engineering - University of Washington".

“I take advantage of a painting that I now have at the Paris' exhibition. 3 orphan girls who are sewing in an interior room. I have sold [it] there for a nice price and have heard some interesting reviews published about it. (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls' brief, in het Nederlands): Ik heb nogal plaizier van eene schilderij die ik thans op de parijsche tentst. Heb. 3 weesmeisjes die in een binnekamer zitten te naaijen. Ik heb [het] daar voor een mooije prijs verkocht en hier en daar interessante kritieken over hooren uitbrengen.
In a letter to A.C. Vosmaer, June 1866; ARA - Tweede afdeling, Archief Vosmaer, input no. 249
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1840 - 1870

Girl, Painting

“Life cannot utter words more great
Than life may meet by sacrifice,
High words were equaled by high fate,
You paid the price. You paid the price.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

To the Memory of Some I knew Who are Dead and Who Loved Ireland (1917)

Life, Fate

“Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340

Life, World, Dreams, Art

“Patience! They will come to it gradually! Rousseau has sold a landscape for five hundred francs; for my part, I have sold a view of Fontainebleau for seventy-five francs. And I am commissioned to ask you for companion sketches to your drawings. And this time, instead of twenty francs, they are to pay you twenty-five! (Millet replied resignedly: 'If I could only sell two drawings a week at that price all would go right!”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Diaz to Millet, c. 1845; as quoted by Albert Wolff, in Notes upon certain masters of the XIX century, - printed not published MDCCCLXXXVI (1886), The Art Age Press, 400 N.Y. (written after the exhibition 'Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvres: the Choice of the French Private Galleries', Petit, Paris / Baschet, New York, 1883, p. 20
In Paris Diaz had sold three drawings of his friend Millet for sixty francs, but Millet stayed still thoughtful, for he had to think of the morrow
Quotes of Diaz

Time, Parting, Drawing, Patience

“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), p. 58

Knowledge

“turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732] Tweets by year, 2017

“Ironically, by transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans. Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Subsidies Distort the Housing Market, September 10, 2003 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr091003.htm 2000s, 2001-2005

Pain, Loss, Housing

“In choosing my materials I wanted to keep an organic feel to the book. Some might consider this an art book, but I was really just trying to give it some life. Having seen what is being printed by majors these days with poor quality paper, I wanted to provide the reader with a book that carries more value near the same price and that can last for generations. Nothing would be more inspiring to me than to know my books are treasured like an heirloom.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Regarding producing his books; as quoted in "Disdeinen" https://archive.is/Nsa8X (13 October 2009).

Life, Books, Art, Feeling

“1. The standard neoclassical model the formal articulation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the contention that market economies will ensure economic efficiency provides little guidance for the choice of economic systems, since once information imperfections (and the fact that markets are incomplete) are brought into the analysis, as surely they must be, there is no presumption that markets are efficient.
2. The Lange-Lerner-Taylor theorem, asserting the equivalence of market and market socialist economies, is based on a misguided view of the market, of the central problems of resource allocation, and (not surprisingly, given the first two failures) of how the market addresses those basic problems.
3. The neoclassical paradigm, through its incorrect characterization of the market economies and the central problems of resource allocation, provides a false sense of belief in the ability of market socialism to solve those resource allocation problems. To put it another way, if the neoclassical paradigm had provided a good description of the resource allocation problem and the market mechanism, then market socialism might well have been a success. The very criticisms of market socialism are themselves, to a large extent, criticisms of the neoclassical paradigm.
4. The central economic issues go beyond the traditional three questions posed at the beginning of every introductory text: What is to be produced? How is it to be produced? And for whom is it to be produced? Among the broader set of questions are: How should these resource allocation decisions be made? Who should make these decisions? How can those who are responsible for making these decisions be induced to make the right decisions? How are they to know what and how much information to acquire before making the decisions? How can the separate decisions of the millions of actors decision makers in the economy be coordinated?
5. At the core of the success of market economies are competition, markets, and decentralization. It is possible to have these, and for the government to still play a large role in the economy; indeed it may be necessary for the government to play a large role if competition is to be preserved. There has recently been extensive confusion over to what to attribute the East Asian miracle, the amazingly rapid growth in countries of this region during the past decade or two. Countries like Korea did make use of markets; they were very export oriented. And because markets played such an important role, some observers concluded that their success was convincing evidence of the power of markets alone. Yet in almost every case, government played a major role in these economies. While Wade may have put it too strongly when he entitled his book on the Taiwan success Governing the Market, there is little doubt that government intervened in the economy through the market.
6. At the core of the failure of the socialist experiment is not just the lack of property rights. Equally important were the problems arising from lack of incentives and competition, not only in the sphere of economics but also in politics. Even more important perhaps were problems of information. Hayek was right, of course, in emphasizing that the information problems facing a central planner were overwhelming. I am not sure that Hayek fully appreciated the range of information problems. If they were limited to the kinds of information problems that are at the center of the Arrow-Debreu model consumers conveying their preferences to firms, and scarcity values being communicated both to firms and consumers then market socialism would have worked. Lange would have been correct that by using prices, the socialist economy could "solve" the information problem just as well as the market could. But problems of information are broader.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Whither Socialism?

Source: Whither Socialism? (1994), Ch. 1 : The Theory of Socialism and the Power of Economic Ideas

Books, Way, Communication, Failure

“More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps. Hand over leaders of the Al Qaeda network, and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens unjustly detained in our country. None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price.”

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

2000s, 2001, Invasion of Afghanistan (October 2001)

Training, Country

“Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
I am invincible
I am woman”

Helen Reddy (1941) Australian actress

"I Am Woman"; written and sung by Reddy
Lyrics, "I Don't Know How To Love Him"(1971)

Wisdom, Pain, Strong

“The average Briton, as well as honorable and right honorable members of the House, had known that England possessed colonies and had understood that colonies, as a matter of course, existed to supply him with sugar and rice, indigo and tobacco, and in return to buy at a good price whatever he might himself wish to sell.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Housing

“The outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther's perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 49.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace

Victory

“It’s hard to explain the cost and consequences of environmental pollution and destruction to a six year old. But we are paying a desperate price even now because adults did not heed the instructions of kindergarten: Clean up your own mess; put things back where you found them; don’t take what’s not yours.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)

“The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business spending, price inflation, interest rates, and productivity gains.”

Mark Skousen (1947) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author

Mark Skousen; in: The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, Vol. 60, Nr. 3-10 (2010). p. 7

Business, Reality, Forgetting

“Cosmopolitan is the best-selling magazine to single women. Cosmo tells single women how they can get a man to commit and achieve her primary fantasy of better homes and gardens. It’s the single female’s version of Playboy. Pornography is the male primary fantasy--access to as many beautiful women as desired without risk of rejection--at a price he can afford!”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 18.

Women, Beauty, Home

““It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”
“What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (37) “Storage”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Life, Freedom

“The price of freedom—of individuality—is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.”

Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction

Short fiction, Heads (1990)

Freedom

“My sense is that factory farms do a great deal of damage to the world that isn't included in the prices of their products. This includes environmental impact and cruelty to animals. I know very little about the former; what I know about the latter mostly comes from a book by Peter Singer (note that Prof. Singer promotes the organization I co-founded, GiveWell).”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

On the "Ethics" https://powersmoothie.org/ethics/ page of his Power Smoothie website

Books, World, Sense, Animals

“In order to have any hope of obtaining the initiative of his workmen the manager must give some special incentive to his men beyond that which is given to the average of the trade. This incentive can be given in several different ways, as, for example, the hope of rapid promotion or advancement; higher wages, either in the form of generous piecework prices or of a premium or bonus of some kind for good and rapid work; shorter hours of labor; better surroundings and working conditions than are ordinarily given, etc., and, above all, this special incentive should be accompanied by that personal consideration for, and friendly contact with, his workmen which comes only from a genuine and kindly interest in the welfare of those under him.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, p. 87.

Men, Hope, Way, Personality

“Through all the years that I have been in business I have never yet found our business bad as a result of any outside force. It has always been due to some defect in our own company, and whenever we located and repaired that defect our business became good again - regardless of what anyone else might be doing. And it will always be found that this country has nationally bad business when business men are drifting, and that business is good when men take hold of their own affairs, put leadership into them, and push forward in spite of obstacles. Only disaster can result when the fundamental principles of business are disregarded and what looks like the easiest way is taken. These fundamentals, as I see them, are:
(1) To make an ever increasingly large quantity of goods of the best possible quality, to make them in the best and most economical fashion, and to force them out onto the market.
(2) To strive always for higher quality and lower prices as well as lower costs.
(3) To raise wages gradually but continuously B and never to cut them.
(4) To get the goods to the consumer in the most economical manner so that the benefits of low cost production may reach him.
These fundamentals are all summed up in the single word 'service'… The service starts with discovering what people need and then supplying that need according to the principles that have just been given.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Henry Ford in: Justus George Frederick (1930), A Philosophy of Production: A Symposium, p. 32; as cited in: Morgen Witzel (2003) Fifty Key Figures in Management. p. 196

Men, People, Way, Fashion

“When we examine this suggestion, we see that it is no more than a formal acknowledgement of a problem, the problem of how (by what institutional arrangement, by what organization of affairs) the equilibrium prices are to be discovered. Repeated trial and error, while the market stands in suspense awaiting the outcome, is not a practical resort. The number of distinct trials, even if confined to discrete steps of price and quantity, would be so immense that the necessary 'market day' would extend beyond human life-times… [The] theoretical ideal applies to mutually isolated days or moments, each to be treated as perfectly self-contained and looking to no yesterday and no tomorrow. But the real market is dealing with goods inherited from yesterday, and in means of production whose products will not be ready till tomorrow. Meanwhile the non-economic circumstances are changing and rendering each successive equilibrium obsolete.”

G. L. S. Shackle (1903–1992) British economist

Source: Epistemics and Economics. (1972), p. 150

Life, Error, Problem, Change

“I have… instituted systematic, voluntary measures of cooperation with the business institutions and with State and municipal authorities to make certain that fundamental businesses of the country shall continue as usual, that wages and therefore consuming power shall not be reduced, and that a special effort shall be made to expand construction work in order to assist in equalizing other deficits in employment… I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence. Wages should remain stable. A very large degree of industrial unemployment and suffering which would otherwise have occurred has been prevented. Agricultural prices have reflected the returning confidence. The measures taken must be vigorously pursued until normal conditions are restored.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

State of the Union Address (3 December 1929)

Confidence, Business, Effort, Suffering

“The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1944) " A Liquidity Preference Theory of Market Prices http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Week%207/Boulding.pdf". In: Economica, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 42 (May, 1944), pp. 55-63. C. Brown (2003) " Toward a reconcilement of endogenous money and liquidity preference http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownjpke.pdf" in: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Winter 2003–4, Vol. 26, No. 2. 323 commented on this article, saying: "Boulding (1944) argued that if liquidity preference were divorced from the "demand for money," the former could come into its own as a theory of financial asset pricing. According to this view, rising liquidity preference or a "wave of bearish sentiment" is manifest in a shift from certain asset categories, specifically, those that are characterized by high capital uncertainty (that is, uncertainty about the future value of the asset as a result of market revaluation) to assets such as commercial paper or giltedged securities." 1940s

Lie, Sense, Sea

“Sometimes the Lord gives us a free sample of religious experience, but for more, we must pay a price with the currency of sincere dedication to the process of cleansing.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

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The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Sincerity

“Roles of pathos were available to boys at my high school, but I eschewed them in favor of a role more akin to Prosecutor, Ironist. I advanced by questions. In some more perfect world, like American Bandstand, I suppose I would have been happier in a sexually integrated high school. I knew how to talk to girls. I had two sisters. And I loved to talk. But early nonsexual female companionship would have come at a price. “Sissy” is the chrysalis of “darling.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Love, World, School, Girl

“Stop complaining about the price of your gas. Be thankful your car doesn't run on bottled water.”

David A. Ridenour

David A. Ridenour, "If Your Car Ran on Bottled Water, You'd be Paying $6.40 a Gallon," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 1, 2006

Cars, Water

“Before it can be said, then, that human freedom and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme Reason are really reconciled, we must have found some way of harmonising the eternity of the human spirit with the creative and regenerative offices of God. The sense of their antagonism is nothing new. Confronted with the race-wide fact of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any but a temporal being; quite as the common-sense of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limitations of the sensory life, proclaims the mere finitude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because the price of their being real is the attributing to man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite! merely finite!" is the steadfast cry of the old theology and of the plodding common realist alike; and, sad to say, of most of historic philosophy too. And the old theology, with more penetrating consistency than the realistic ordinary man or the ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindication of the Divine Sovereignty from all human encroachment by denying the freedom of man altogether.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.330-1

Life, God, Sadness, Dreams

“I repainted the only unsold picture that was [exhibited] in Rotterdam last year. It seems to me that it looks quite pleasing and good now... I want you to ask him [the client] seven hundred guilders.... for six hundred as lowest price I would be willing to sell it and if you think - knowing him - it would be better to ask that price at once, so do it.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek (original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Ik heb het eenige nog niet verkochte schilderij dat voorl. jaar te Rotterdam was, overgeschilderd.. .Mij dunkt, dat het er nog al aangenaam en goed uitziet.. .Ik wilde dat gij hem zevenhonderd guldens voor vroeg.. ..voor zeshonderd zou ik het uiterlijk kunnen laten en meent gij, hem kennende, het beter zou zijn dadelijk die prijs te vragen zoo doe het dan. Quote from a letter of W. Roelofs, Brussel 20 June, 1860, to art-collector/dealer P. verloren van Themaat in Utrecht, from: an extract of the Dutch Archive RKD, The Hague https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/289 this letter is one of many illustrations that Roelofs repainted his paintings rather frequently, as improvement or on demand of the client 1860's

Thinking

“Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman's counsel; her wing'd spirit
Is feather'd oftentimes with heavenly words.”

George Chapman The Gentleman Usher

The Gentleman Usher, Act IV, scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As translated in Hitler's Secret Book (1961) Grove Press edition, pp. 8-9, 17-18
1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

Life, Children, Truth, Birth

“There are a large number of religious establishments ["convents "] which they call khanqahs, and the nobles vie with one another in building them. Each of these is set apart for a separate school of darwishes, mostly Persians, who are men of good education and adepts in the mystical doctrines. Each has a superior and a doorkeeper and their affairs are admirably organized. They have many special customs one of which has to do with their food. The steward of the house comes in the morning to the darwishes, each of whom indicates what food he desires, and when they assemble for meals, each person is given his bread and soup in a separate dish, none sharing with another. They eat twice a day. They are each given winter clothes and summer clothes, and a monthly allowance of from twenty to thirty dirhams. Every Thursday night they receive sugar cakes, soap to wash their clothes, the price of a bath, and oil for their lamps. These men are celibate; the married men have separate convents.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Men, Education, School, Food

“The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

Behavior, Game, Change, Parting

“I personally believed, at least in 1914 when predator control began, that there could not be too much horned game, and that the extirpation of predators was a reasonable price to pay for better big game hunting. Some of us have learned since the tragic error of such a view, and acknowledged our mistake. One must judge from the present volume that the Fish and Wildlife Service does not see any mistake.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Review of The Wolves of North America by Stanley P. Young and Edward A. Goldman" [1944]; Published in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony (eds.) 1990 , p. 226.
1940s

Error, Game, Fish, Learning

“Competition is the final price determinant and competitive prices may result in profits which force you to accept a rate of return less than you hoped for, or for that matter to accept temporary losses. And, in times of inflation, the rate-of-return concept comes up against the problem of assets undervalued in terms of replacement. Nevertheless, no other financial principle with which I am acquainted serves better than rate of return as an objective aid to business judgment. This principle had governed the thinking of the Finance Committee of General Motors since 1917.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 140

Hope, Business, Problem, Thinking

“The centrally planned economies, dissatisfied with the outcome of their own efforts to achieve good economic growth performance, have changed strategy and decided to import high technology from the West. as well as necessary grains to supplement their domestic agicultural supplies. This new approach has opened their economies to Western inflation because imports have been reflecting rising world price. Gold and oil sales at correspondingly rising prices have been used by the Soviet Union to finance part of their import needs. but they are fully enmeshed in world inflation accounting in balancing rising export prices.”

Lawrence Klein (1920–2013) American economist

"Some Economic Scenarios for the 1980's," 1980

World, Effort, Change, Parting

“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 130

Success

“The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it…”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Mind and Matter (1958)

World, Parting

“Does the Minister accept that the attitude of the EEC and of North American countries towards commodity prices has been a major contributory factor in the debt crisis in much of the world? Does she agree that the latest round of Lomé convention prices on exports from ACP countries has resulted in virtually the lowest real terms prices ever achieved by those countries? They are worried about the way in which they have been treated by the EEC. Is the right hon. Lady aware that exports from ACP countries to the European Community are at their lowest level for 25 years? Those countries and many of us are worried about the growing crisis faced by the poorer countries because the richer industrial countries are closing their markets to them and forcing them into debt and low commodity prices.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/jan/08/commodity-prices in the House of Commons (8 January 1990). 1990s

World, Way, Communication, Country

“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

“Modern macroeconomics flourished in its pursuit of the secrets of long-run economic growth, but it neglected short-run economic problems. In the long run, prices are flexible, and the growth of the economy is determined by the growth in the ability to supply goods and services. But in the short run prices are not flexible. Growth can be held back because prices are too high and, as a result, demand is too low. Keynes made his name by analyzing short-run problems caused by the stickiness or even rigidity of some important prices. But these Keynesian ideas were abandoned by modern macroeconomics.”

Peter Temin (1937) American economist

Why Keynes is Important Today (2014)

Secret, Idea, Problem

“The Conservative Party is the parent of trade unionism, just as it is the author of the Factory Acts. At every stage in the history of the nineteenth century it is to Toryism that trade unionism has looked for help and support against the oppressions of the Manchester School of liberalism, which cared nothing for the interests of the state, and regarded men as brute beasts whose labour could be bought and sold at the cheapest price, irrespective of all other considerations.”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Introduction to H. Hills and M. Woods, Industrial Unrest: A Practical Solution (1914)

Men, School, History, Support

“Diverting attention from the way in which certain beliefs, desires, attitudes, or values are the result of particular power relations, then, can be a sophisticated way of contributing to the maintenance of an ideology, and one that will be relatively immune to normal forms of empirical refutation. If I claim (falsely) that all human societies, or all human societies at a certain level of economic development, have a free market in health services, that is a claim that can be demonstrated to be false. On the other hand, if I focus your attention in a very intense way on the various different tariffs and pricing schema that doctors or hospitals or drug companies impose for their products and services, and if I become morally outraged by “excessive” costs some drug companies charge, discussing at great length the relative rates of profit in different sectors of the economy, and pressing the moral claims of patients, it is not at all obvious that anything I say may be straightforwardly “false”; after all, who knows what “excessive” means? However, by proceeding in this way I might well focus your attention on narrow issues of “just” pricing, turning it away from more pressing issues about the acceptance in some societies of the very existence of a free market for drugs and medical services. One can even argue that the more outraged I become about the excessive price, the more I obscure the underlying issue. One way, then, in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 54.

Health, Way, Falseness

“Unless we address those problems from the point of view of a world where development is genuinely sustainable, where protection of the environment is vital, where the earth's wealth is redistributed in favour of the poorest people in the poorest countries, in the next few years we shall face a growing imbalance between north and south. Ever-increasing numbers of people will flee from environmental destruction—from rain forest destruction, increased desertification and the increased flooding linked to that. Millions of people will have to flee from the places where they grew up and live and there will be growing imbalances in the world, and growing poverty. There has to be a change in the relationship. That means that higher prices must be paid for commodities. It means that there must be an increased aid programme, and an understanding that we are all in this together.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/dec/14/overseas-development in the House of Commons (14 December 1990). 1990s

People, World, Understanding, Problem

“There was no other alternative [to the disappearances]… [Military leaders] were in agreement that it was the price that must be paid to win the war against subversion and we needed that it not be obvious so society would not realize it. It was necessary to eliminate a large group of people who could not be brought to justice nor [openly] shot either.”

Jorge Rafael Videla (1925–2013) Argentinian President

Videla in 2012, as quoted in Adam Bernstein (May 17 2013). "Jorge Rafael Videla, ruthless Argentine junta leader, dies at 87". The Washington Post.

War, People, Justice

“It should not be a federal crime to charge low prices to American consumers.”

James Bovard (1956) American journalist

From The Fair Trade Fraud (St. Martin's Press, 1991) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigrams%20page%20Fair%20Trade%20Fraud.htm

“The duty on British teas was slight. Americans might have paid the duty without increasing the price of their much prized luxury; ministers might have collected the same duty in England to the advantage of the Exchequer. That Britain should have insisted on this peppercorn in acknowledgement of her right, that America should have refused it in vindication of her liberty, may be taken as a high tribute from two eminently practical peoples to the power of abstract ideas.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

People, Idea, Tea

“Athena's great problem was that she was a woman of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first, and making no secret of the fact, either. Did she pay a price? She certainly did. But she would have paid a still higher price if she had repressed her natural exuberance. She would have been bitter, frustrated, always concerned about "what other people might think," always saying, "I'll just sort these things out, then I'll devote myself to my dream," always complaining "that the conditions are never quite right."”

Paulo Coelho book The Witch of Portobello

Deidre O'Neill, known as Edda, p. 11.
The Witch of Portobello (2007)

People, Secret, Dreams, Nature

“It is quite true that partition far from proving to be a solution to the Muslim problem has only aggravated it. But it is simply not true that there was a happy solution waiting round the corner only if partition had been avoided. For the Muslims demanded parity as the price for remaining in a politically united India and surely this was an impossible demand.”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

Muslim politics, p.113, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 368

Happiness, Problem, Waiting

“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

“This much have I learned: A man’s life weighs more than glory, and a price paid in blood is a heavy reckoning.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book V : The High King (1968), Chapter 3 (Taran)

Life, Learning

“There's no question that demand for traditional sport utility vehicles has been affected by rising gas prices…”

Steve Lyons (1960) American baseball player

Question, Sport

“The general character of our solution must be, therefore, that it withdraws from expenditure a proportion of the increased earnings. This is the only way, apart from shortages of goods or higher prices, by which we can secure a balance between money to be spent and goods to be bought.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 2 : The Character of the Solution

Money, Way

“Much time was wasted and ink spilled in the late 1960s and early 1970s trying to interpret the lagged effect of prices on wages as reflecting adaptive lags in the formation of expectations. But if we have learned anything from the new Keynesian economics of Fischer, Taylor, Blanchard, and their younger followers, it is that price and wage inertia is compatible with rational expectations.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Robert J. Gordon, The Phillips Curve Now and Then. (1990).

Learning, Time

“The entrepreneur is the person who seeks to identify what consumers, at home or abroad or both, want and would be willing to buy at a profitable price. These entrepreneurs are the job-creators because it is they who gather the men and women, the material, the machinery, and the money to turn the vision of a market into a reality.”

Keith Joseph (1918–1994) British barrister and politician

in 1986 introduction to Self-Help, Samuel Smiles originally published in 1859.
1980s

Women, Men, Money, Home

“If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

Manners from Heaven (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1984), ch. 2, p. 21
Manners from Heaven (1984)

Life, Family, Star

“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Guardian columns

Hate, People, Cats, Learning

“A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

July 2005 http://www.startribune.com/nation/12598281.html, in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee. 2000s

Home, Housing

“Barack Obama has failed America. When he took office, the economy was in recession. He made it worse. And he made it last longer. Three years later, over 16 million Americans are out of work or have just quit looking. Millions more are underemployed. Three years later, unemployment is still above 8%, a figure he said his stimulus would keep from happening. Three years later, foreclosures are still at record levels. Three years later the prices of homes continue to fall. Three years later, our national debt has grown nearly as large as our entire economy. Families are buried under higher prices for food and higher prices for gasoline. It breaks my heart to see what's happening in this country. These failing hopes make up President Obama's own misery index. It's never been higher.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Mitt Romney 2012 Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech http://blog.4president.org/2012/2011/06/mitt-romney-2012-presidential-campaign-announcement-speech-june-2-2011-stratham-new-hampshire-remark.html 2011

Family, Food, Hope, Home

“It is difficult to assess how much this gambling spirit is active in the minds of individual investors. If it is, even to a small degree, it is relevant to our discussion since it makes investors prone to imitation and herding because they invest on little information. It may also explain the anomalously large volatility of prices and their potential instabilities.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 4, Positive Feedbacks, p. 114.

“One theory is that the antichrist will be a major political leader in the United Nations and the “many” referred to is the UN. Another theory is that the “many” refers to the Arab League of Nations since their mosques are now on the temple mount where the temple needs to go. Many believe there is room to put the temple on a ten-acre plot north of the two mosques. The temple mount is about 37 acres. Keep an eye out for a treaty that allows Israel to rebuild the temple! If one is made, start the clock ticking again for that final week! It may be the Muslims will offer to trade the Jews ten acres on the temple mount to build their temple, for the entire West Bank? Plus five gazillion dollars! Israel wants that spot bad enough to pay any price. We’ll see.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 101

“The fallacy of the claim that the costs of government are borne by the rich and those who make a direct contribution to the National Treasury can not be too often exposed. No system has been devised, I do not think any system could be devised, under which any person living in this country could escape being affected by the cost of our government. It has a direct effect both upon the rate and the purchasing power of wages. It is felt in the price of those prime necessities of existence, food, clothing, fuel and shelter. It would appear to be elementary that the more the Government expends the more it must require every producer to contribute out of his production to the Public Treasury, and the less he will have for his own benefit. The continuing costs of public administration can be met in only one way — by the work of the people. The higher they become, the more the people must work for the Government. The less they are, the more the people can work for themselves.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, Food, Way, Thinking

“The price of labor in the high-tech labor market is a function of a political, artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants. Prattle about the price at which American workers will do certain work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—communities. Render asunder the quaint idea of borders—and the world is your labor market; communities be damned. Realize that this ceaseless supply of labor is maintained not through peaceful market forces, but through the use of political power, wielded by wealthy men and women with access. At work here is their Brave New Borderless World, not the invisible hand we love.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“ Why Tax Breaks Won’t Stop High-Tech, H-1B Human Trafficking https://constitution.com/tax-breaks-wont-stop-high-tech-h-1b-human-trafficking/,” Constitution.com, November 16, 2017.” 2010s, 2017

Love, Women, Men, World

“The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco-Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis!”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

5 November 1941.
Disputed, Hitler's Table Talks (1941-1944) (published 1953)

People, World, Art, Intelligence

“It is not to be inferred that it would be anything less than courting national disaster to leave our country barren of defense. Human nature is a very constant quality. While there is justification for hoping and believing that we are moving toward perfection, it would be idle and absurd to assume that we have already reached it. We can not disregard history. There have been and will be domestic disorders. There have been and will be tendencies of one nation to encroach on another. I believe in the maintenance of an Army and Navy, not for aggression but for defense. Security and order are our most valuable possessions. They are cheap at any price. But I am opposed to every kind of military aggrandizement and to all forms of competitive armament. The ideal would be for nations to become parties to mutual covenants limiting their military establishments, and making it obvious that they are not maintained to menace each other. This ideal should be made practical as fast as possible.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Hope, History, Nature, Perfection

“The confusion has by now become very widespread, and is symbolized by the sanctimonious slogan of sarva-dharma-samabhãva. This slogan was coined by Mahatma Gandhi and included in his MaNgala Prabhãta as one of the sixteen mahãvratas. The result was an unprecedented appeasement of Islam starting with the Mahatma’s support of the Khilafat movement. The Mahatma had believed sincerely that he could touch the heart of Islam and win over the Muslims to nationalism by paying handsome tributes to the Quran and the Prophet. But he also ended as a colossal failure like Kabir and Nanak. In the final upshot, he had to pay the price with his own life, and the nation had to suffer partition of the motherland.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Life, Failure, Support, Suffering

“I can date my own personal 'revolution' rather exactly to May or June 1933. It was like this. It began… with Hayek. His "Prices and Production" is one of the influences that can be detected in The Theory of Wages; it could not have been otherwise, for 1931 was a Prices and Production year at the London School of Economics… I did not in fact find it all easy to fit in with my own ideas. What started me off in 1933 was an earlier work of Hayek's, his paper on 'Intertemporal Equilibrium', an idea which I found easier to reduce to my preferred (Paretian or Wicksellian) pattern.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

John Hicks, The Theory of Wages, 2nd Edition (1963), p. 307

School, Idea, Personality

“In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege … is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery. All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand (2002)

Sense

“Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn't exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It's time to change all that. It's time to win again.”

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

Source: 2010s, 2015, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (2015), p. 34

Change, Time, Dependency, Country

“Hindus were so much impoverished that their wives had to work as servants in Muslim houses. The wives and children of Hindu merchants were kept as hostages at the capital to ensure that they brought regular supplies, which they had to sell at fixed prices to the Muslim rulers.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Children, Housing

“Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 8 : The West and the Rest: Intercivilizational Issues, § 1 : Western Universalism, p. 184

Democracy, Universe

“It is no more evident that democratic institutions are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. … Even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

People, Democracy, Freedom, Personality

“No price is too great to pay for inner peace.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

Words of Wisdom (2010)

Peace

Quotes about price page 4

Quotes about price
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