Quotes about pricing (1309 quotes, page 12)

“It will be, I suppose, a foolhardy Government that tries to push through legislation making knowledge of both official languages one of the qualifications for election to the House of Commons or appointment to the Senate, but maybe it will have to come to this as a price we must pay for equality of the two great language groups of our founding fathers.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 7, The Favreau tragedy, p. 134

Knowledge , Housing

“We need to recognise that the entire information sector—from music to newspapers to telecoms to internet to semiconductors and anything in-between—has become subject to a gigantic market failure in slow motion. A market failure exists when market prices cannot reach a self-sustaining equilibrium. The market failure of the entire information sector is one of the fundamental trends of our time, with far-reaching long-term effects, and it is happening right in front of our eyes.”

Eli Noam (1946) professor of Finance and Economics at the Columbia Business School

Eli Noam in: " Eli Noam: Market failure in the media sector http://www.citi.columbia.edu/elinoam/FT/2-16-04/MarketFailure.htm" at news.ft.com, February 16 2004
The context of this quote was a digression on the media, telecommunication, information technology, and internet industries.

Music , Failure , Time

“In our spiritual forthbringing He useth more tenderness of keeping, without any likeness: by as much as our soul is of more price in His sight. He kindleth our understanding, He directeth our ways, He easeth our conscience, He comforteth our soul, He lighteneth our heart, and giveth us, in part, knowing and believing in His blissful Godhead, with gracious mind in His sweet Manhood and His blessed Passion, with reverent marvelling in His high, overpassing Goodness; and maketh us to love all that He loveth, for His love, and to be well-pleased with Him and all His works. And when we fall, hastily He raiseth us by His lovely calling and gracious touching. And when we be thus strengthened by His sweet working, then we with all our will choose Him, by His sweet grace, to be His servants and His lovers lastingly without end.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 61

Love , Way , Soul , Lovers

“The destruction of the old bonds between employers and workmen was not peculiar to manufactures; it came to pass in agriculture also. An agrarian as well as an industrial revolution had taken place. Scientific methods of cultivation had been substituted for unscientific; vast enclosures had been made; traces of the old three-field system of apportioning the land were fast disappearing; small farms were giving way to large. A new race of farmers, corresponding to the new race of manufacturers, had sprung into existence, who, enriched by the high prices which prevailed during the great war, changed their habits of life. The labourer ceased to be a member of the farmer's household, and, to use Cobbett's words, was thrust out of the farm-house into a hovel.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 191

Life , War , Way , Change

“Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Goods on Gas," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=7 WorldNetDaily.com, July 13, 2008.
2000s, 2008

Fools

“"The work of men" — and what is that? Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it is a mortal one — we want to keep back part of the price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm in a cross was the weight of it — as if it was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be — crucified upon. "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 405.

Men , Thinking , Christ , Parting

“No pure delight cheers the farmer whose mind is intent on the price he shall get for his crops rather than on the joy there is in tilling them and seeing them grow and ripen: for such an one does not love the land nor his home nor any of the most beautiful and sacred things, but tends to become like the brute that eats and sleeps and dies. His thoughts are with what feeds the animal, and that which nourishes the human is hidden from him.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 168

Love , Beauty , Home , Sleep

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

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Age , Confidence

“Organization theory is the branch of sociology that studies organizations as distinct units in society. The organizations examined range from sole proprietorships, hospitals and community-based non-profit organizations to vast global corporations. The field’s domain includes questions of how organizations are structured, how they are linked to other organizations, and how these structures and linkages change over time. Although it has roots in administrative theories, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, the theory of the firm in microeconomics, and Coase’s theory of firm boundaries, organization theory as a distinct domain of sociology can be traced to the late 1950s and particularly to the work of the Carnegie School. In addition to sociology, organization theory draws on theory in economics, political science and psychology, and the range of questions addressed reflects this disciplinary diversity. While early work focused on specific questions about organizations per se – for instance, why hierarchy is so common, or how businesses set prices – later work increasingly studied organizations and their environments, and ultimately organizations as building blocks of society. Organization theory can thus be seen as a family of mechanisms for analysing social outcomes.”

Gerald F. Davis (1961) American sociologist

Gerald F. Davis (2013). "Organizational theory," in: Jens Beckert & Milan Zafirovski (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, p. 484-488

School , Family , Communication , Question

“The world should forget about cheap oil. [The price] will keep going up and some day arrive at US$100 per barrel.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez at a press conference in New Delhi, after signing a cooperative agreement with India's hydrocarbon sector, March 2005.
2005

World , Forgetting

“The marketplace does only one thing — it puts a price on everything.The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Commencement speech http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/june20/gradtrans-062007.html, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures

Life

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

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

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

“We want Trump to be hugely successful, so we don’t want to handle a bill that’s going to fail in a few years, Trump ran on price-discovery and competition across state lines, getting the price down — the price is going up by 20 percent and the bill we are getting ready to vote on, once again, goes back and does too much emphasis on the coverage aspect”

Dave Brat (1964) American economist and professor at Randolph–Macon College

Rep. Dave Brat: RyanCare a Perverse Economic System http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/11/exclusive-rep-dave-brat-ryancare-a-perverse-economic-system/ (March 17, 2017)

Success

“I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

Feeling

“What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it’s going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, "Abbott accused of being 'incredibly old-fashioned' as he lets off steam" http://www.smh.com.au/national/abbott-accused-of-being-incredibly-oldfashioned-as-he-lets-off-steam-20100209-nnqr.html, February 9, 2010.
2010

Understanding

“Ooo la la la la
I did you wrong; my heart went out to play.
But in the game I lost you.
What a price to pay, hey I'm crying.

Ooo baby baby.
Ooo baby baby.”

Smokey Robinson (1940) American R&B singer-songwriter and record producer

Ooo Baby Baby, written by Smokey Robinson and Pete Moore (1965)
Song lyrics, With The Miracles

Cry , Game , Heart , Baby

“The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS—orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U. S. market—not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders.”

Michael Lewis book Flash Boys

Source: Flash Boys (2014), p. 73

“We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement -- that's the kindest word I can give you -- of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war. The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously. I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

[Associated Press, McCain blasts Rumsfeld for Iraq war missteps, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17231371/from/RS.5/, MSNBC.com, 2007-02-19, 2007-02-20]
2000s, 2007

War , History , Thinking

“We were promised a better life in our home countries when we were told that privatized water and electricity would make things run more efficiently instead the quality remained almost the same and the price was increased until it became an unaffordable luxury”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Open Your Eyes
Albums, The 3rd World (2008)

Life , Home , Water , Country

“What is the good, I ask, in the name of common sense, of prohibiting sweating in this country if you allow sweated goods to come in from foreign countries? If you insist on limitation, of hours and upon precautions for security, bear in mind all these things add to the cost of production, to the difficulties of the manufacturer in selling his goods, and unless you give him some increased price, some increased advantage in compensation, then he cannot carry on competition any longer. All these conditions in the long run will result not to your advantage, for you will have no work to do, but to the advantage of the foreigner, who is not so scrupulous and who conducts his work without any of these conditions…If protected labour is good, and I think in many ways it is…then it is good to protect the results of labour, and you cannot do one without the other.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Liverpool (27 October 1903), quoted in The Times (28 October 1903), p. 6.
1900s

Way , Thinking , Sense , Country

“In the interior of the atom, Bohr had tried the plan of retaining the particle-electron and modifying the classical mechanics. Heisenberg took the opposite course, his procedure amounting in effect to retaining the classical mechanics, at least in form, and modifying the electron. Actually, the electron dropped out all together, because it exists only as a matter of inference and not of direct observation. For the same reason, the new theory contains no mention of atoms, nuclei, protons, or of electricity in any shape or form. The existences of all these are matters of inference, and Heisenberg's purely mathematical theory could no more make contact with them than with the efficiency of a turbine or with the price of wheat.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Mathematics

“In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the social choice in any given situation, for example, a religious code.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 1: Opening pharagraph

World , Democracy , Decision

“All this money can't buy me a time machine, no
Can't replace you with a million rings, no.
I should have told you what you meant to me, whoa.
Cause now I pay the price.”

Katy Perry (1984) American singer, songwriter and actress

The One That Got Away
Song lyrics, Teenage Dream (2010)

Money , Time

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

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 174

Communication , Help , Parting

“All life is based on the fact that anything worth getting is hard to get. There is a price to be paid for anything. Scholarship can only be bought at the price of study, skill of craft or technique can only be bought at the price of practice, and eminence in any sport can only be bought at the price of training and discipline.”

William Barclay (1907–1978) Church of Scotland minister and academic

William Barclay (1964) The Gospel of John. Vol. 2, p. 77

Life , Sport , Study , Training

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

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

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

Law , Question

“Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life.”

Alfred Bester book The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

in Hartwell ed. The World Treasury of Science Fiction, p. 268 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1958)
The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (1958)

Life , Men , Truth , World

“The empirical successes of [the three-factor model] suggest that it is an equilibrium pricing model, a three-factor version of Merton’s (1973) intertemporal CAPM (ICAPM) or Ross’s (1976) arbitrage pricing theory (APT). In this view, SMB and HML mimic combinations of two underlying risk factors or state variables of special hedging concern to investors.”

Eugene Fama (1939) American economist and Nobel laureate in Economics

Source: Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds, 1993, p. 57

Success

“No, liberty is not made for us: we are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptuous, too cowardly, too vile, too corrupt, too attached to rest and to pleasure, too much slaves to fortune to ever know the true price of liberty. We boast of being free! To show how much we have become slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants.”

Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) politician and journalist during the French Revolution

L'Ami du peuple, no.559 (1791-08-27)

Pleasure

“If you want to understand financial markets, and their effects on the economy, you have to understand the trading game. Many short-term price movements are neither random nor caused by economic fundamentals. They're caused by investors buying and selling.”

Aaron C. Brown (1956) American financial analyst

Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 1, The Art of Uncalculated Risk, p. 12

Game , Understanding

“A leading firm that controlled a large portion of the output of a given organizational field operated as a price setter. To set prices, the actors in that firm had to control their suppliers and marketing in order to increase their own efficiency and have the potential to cut off other firms from supplies or customers.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 89

“What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world of the strong ties between parent and children, ties which an active personal relation from birth until death?… Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialization of emotions which might be bought about the other ways, notable through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds its interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, the Electra complexes, and so on.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 147; Partly cited in: E. Michael Jones (1993) Degenerate Moderns: Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior. p. 24-25

Death , Women , Men , Children

“The system wasn't working, and I thought it was time to err on the side of a new model. What might work, I thought, was a system that promoted personal accountability, consistency, and certainty. Congress could say people who committed the same federal crime, under the same circumstances, were going to jail for the same amount of time. We could give judges a narrower set of sentencing guidelines to work with, and felons would be required to pay the same price. We'd be judging the crime, not the person.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 123
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

People , Time , Personality

“Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

Life , Law , Democracy , Home

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

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

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

Hunger , Law

“The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley) (1968).

Life , Sense , Passion

“As forests in Bucovina, all those mountains laden with first belonging to the Orthodox Church, which was now infused with politics, and estranged, were given to the Jew Anhauh for exploitation of the firewood at the unheard-of price of 10 lei per cubic yard, while the Romanian peasant had to pay 3.50 lei. The mountains' forests fall under the merciless Jewish axe. Poverty and sorrow spreads over the Romanian villages, mountains become barren rock, while Anhauh and his kin carry constantly and tirelessly their gold-laden coffers over the border. The partner-in-crime of the Jew in exploiting the misery of thousands of peasants, was the Romanian politician who gorged himself on his portion of this fabulous profit.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

Mountain

“All human beings have their price, and quite often it is surprisingly small. The trick consists of knowing exactly what that price is, when they themselves do not.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 6, “Practical Designs” (p. 83)

“A powerful consumers cooperative movement helps to maintain an equitable balance between prices and profits, and thereby decreases the power of owners and investors.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

Help

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

Étienne de La Boétie book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Part 2
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Children , People , Pleasure , Books

“Ibn Battutah while in Bengal says that a pretty kaniz (slave girl) could be had there for one gold dinar (or 10 silver tankahs). "I purchased at this price a very beautiful slave girl whose name was Ashura. A friend of mine also bought a young slave named Lulu for two gold coins."”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4
Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Beauty , Girl

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

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

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

Time , Help

“Socialists then shift the ground for taking industries into “public ownership”. They then tell us that some industries cannot survive any longer unless they are taken into public ownership, allegedly to protect the public from the effects of their collapse. It all sounds so cosy, and so democratic. But is it true? No, of course it isn't. The moment ownership passes into the name of the public is the moment the public ceases to have any ownership or accountability, and often the moment when it ceases to get what it wants. But it is invariably the moment when the public starts to pay. Pays to take the industry over. Pays the losses by higher taxes. Pays for inefficiencies in higher prices.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Finchley Conservatives (31 January 1976) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102947
Leader of the Opposition

Loss

“Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part Three, Arbitrage, The Random Walk Cosa Nostra, p. 122
Fortune's Formula (2005)

“Putting a low price on valuable environmental resources is a phenomenon that pervades modern society. Agricultural water is not scarce in California; it is underpriced. Flights are stacked up on runways because takeoffs and landings are underpriced. People wait for hours in traffic jams because road use is unpriced. People die premature deaths from small sulfur particles in the air because air pollution is underpriced. And the most perilous of all environmental problems, climate change, is taking place because virtually every country puts a price of zero on carbon dioxide emissions.”

William D. Nordhaus (1941) American economist

"The Pope & the Market," The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015

Death , People , Problem , Water

“Price tags advertise your pride.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, A Crow Left of the Murder... (2004)

“[T]he litigation between Qualcomm and Apple/Intel … is weird. What makes it weird is that Intel appears to think that by helping Apple drive down Qualcomm prices, it will gain an advantage, but since its only value is as a lower cost, lower performing, alternative to Qualcomm's modems, the result would be more aggressively priced better alternatives to Intel's offerings from Qualcomm/Broadcom, wiping Intel out of the market. On paper, this is a lose/lose for Intel and even for Apple. The lower prices would flow to Apple competitors as well, lowering the price of competing phones. So, Apple would not get a lasting benefit either.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Broadcom/Qualcomm Merger: A Train Wreck in Slow Motion http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/broadcomqualcomm-merger-a-train-wreck-in-slow-motion.html in IT Business Edge (1 March 2018)

Thinking , Appearance , Help

“The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?”

Eben Moglen (1959) American law professor and free software advocate

The DotCommunist Manifesto, UNC-Chapel Hill, Howard W. Odum Institute, November 8, 2001 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2263095526020953463.

Art , Question , Knowledge , Time

“When the “environmental revolution” arrived in the 1960s, economists were ready and waiting. The economic literature contained an apparently coherent view of the nature of the pollution problem together with a compelling set of implications for public policy. In short, economists saw the problem of environmental degradation as one in which economic agents imposed external costs upon society at large in the form of pollution. With no “prices” to provide the proper incentives for reduction of polluting activities, the inevitable result was excessive demands on the assimilative capacity of the environment. The obvious solution to the problem was to place an appropriate “price,” in this case a tax, on polluting activities so as to internalize the social costs. Marshall and Pigou had suggested such measures many decades earlier. Moreover, pollution and its control through so-called Pigouvian taxes had become a standard textbook case of the application of the principles of microeconomic theory. Economists were thus ready to provide counsel to policy makers on the design of environmental policy.”

William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist

Source: The theory of environmental policy, 1988, p. 1

Literature , Nature , Problem , Waiting

“Symbolic castration - the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to be paid for access to his desire.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

147
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Loss

“Some of these quantities refer directly to a point of time. That is true of "capital value" as also of such quantities as demand and supply prices. Other terms – as e. g. "income", "revenue", "return", "expenses", "savings", "investments" – imply, however, a time period for which they are reckoned. But in order to be unambiguous they must also refer to a point of time at which they are calculated.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 46-7

Time

“But if physical death is the price that a man must pay to free his children and his white brethren from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive. This is the type of soul force that I am convinced will triumph over the physical force of the oppressor.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousnes (1960)

Death , Children , Soul

“London used to be reasonably priced, clean, and a decent place to live. These days it's polluted and utterly unbearable”

Munir Butt (1940–2015) British diplomat

Source: The Business (magazine), 2006.

“Sports officials must work with more responsibility to develop sports. Even under the good governance government some Sports Ministry officials don't carry out their duties properly as they are influenced by money and power. It is always sports clubs, institutions and sports personnel who pay the price for all misconducts of officials. To change this trend sports authority must take the necessary steps.”

Arjuna Ranatunga (1963) Sri Lankan cricketer

Daily News, "Sports Ministry must act with more responsibility - Arjuna Ranatunga" http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=2016/02/18/sports/sports-ministry-must-act-more-responsibility-arjuna-ranatunga, February 18, 2016.

Money , Sport , Change

“Each boat is worth the price of a new university and they are watched by gin-soaked yachting types, male and female, in captain's hats lounging in deckchairs inside Perspex covered enclosures at the front of yet more expensive, floating country houses representing nothing more than elegantly vulgar expressions of dodgy wealth. The America's Cup.”

Ralph Steadman book The Joke's Over

The America's Cup, p. 45
The Joke's Over (2006)

Universe , Housing , Country , Wealth

“[Labour will deal with racketeering in the price of land. ] I call that a socialist theme. Yes, and I should have thought a Liberal theme. That great modernizing party on this theme at least at Scarborough last week carried through an exercise in recidivism which places its present leadership some years behind the Liberals some 60 years ago. In 1909 and 1910 they filled the land with song—'God gave the land to the people'. Now in 1965 we have the first fruits of Liberal revisionism. While they would not intend to throw doubt on the Almighty's intention in this respect, their researches suggest he did not intend this declaration to be taken too literally.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (28 September 1965), quoted in The Times (29 September 1965), p. 5.

God , People , Exercises

“They have sheets of ham so large that if you bite out the middle, you've saved yourself the price of a poncho.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On the countryside.
Like, Totally (2006)

“The distinction between micro- and macro inventions matters because they appeared to be governed by different laws. Microinventions generally result from an intentional search for improvements, and are understandable -if not predictable- by economic forces. They are guided, at least to some extent, by the laws of supply and demand and by the intensity of search and the resources committed to them, and thus by signals emitted by the price mechanism. Furthermore, in so far as micro inventions are the by-products of experience through learning by doing or learning by using they are correlated with output or investment. Macroinventions are more difficult to understand, and seem to be governed by individual genius and luck as much as by economic forces. Often they are based on some fortunate event, in which an inventor stumbles on one thing while looking for another, arrives at the right conclusion for the wrong reason, or brings to bear a seemingly unrelated body of knowledge that just happen to hold the clue to the right solution. The timing of these inventions is consequently often hard to explain. Much of the economic literature dealing with the generation of technological progress through market mechanisms and incentive devices thus explain only part of the story. This does not mean that we have to give up the attempt to try to understand macroinventions. We must, however, look for explanations largely outside the trusted and familiar market mechanisms relied upon by economists.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 295; as cited by Pol, Eduardo, and Peter Carroll.

Law , Search , Literature , Understanding

“The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.”

John Ruskin book Unto This Last

Essay I: "The Roots of Honour," section 29.
Unto This Last (1860)
Context: “I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work.” By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be “chosen.” The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.

Nature , Falseness

“Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villainies, and to know every godless deed. But all the men who wrought this thing for hire have made it sure that, soon or late, they shall pay the price.”

Sophocles (-496–-406 BC) ancient Greek tragedian

Source: Antigone, Lines 295-303

Men , Money , Home , Soul

“I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose.
We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Religious Belief and Public Morality (1984)
Context: I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose.
We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.
This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern.

“Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.”

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

Costly Grace, p 43.
Costly Grace
Context: Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?

“The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 54, p. 291
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Context: The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

Pleasure , Exercises

“There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

The Emperor's Old Clothes
Context: [About PL/I] At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

Way

“Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. … [O]ne can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Jimmy Wales, cited by Katherine Mangu-Ward, " Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision http://reason.com/archives/2007/05/30/wikipedia-and-beyond," Reason (June 2007).
Also cited by Morton Winston and Ralph Edelbach, Society, Ethics, and Technology 4th ed. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 200.

Idea , Understanding , Thinking

“Love is not to be purchased, and affection has no price.”
Caritas non potest conparari; dilectio pretium non habet.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 3
Letters

Love

“The lesson of the past century has been that where the dignity of the individual has been trampled or threatened — where citizens have not enjoyed the basic right to choose their government, or the right to change it regularly — conflict has too often followed, with innocent civilians paying the price, in lives cut short and communities destroyed.
The obstacles to democracy have little to do with culture or religion, and much more to do with the desire of those in power to maintain their position at any cost. This is neither a new phenomenon nor one confined to any particular part of the world. People of all cultures value their freedom of choice, and feel the need to have a say in decisions affecting their lives.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Nobel lecture (2001)

World , Religion , Democracy , Communication

“Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

We the People interview (1996)
Context: The latent function of schooling, that is, the hidden curriculum, which forms individuals into needy people who know that they have now satisfied a little bit of their needs for education, is much more important... The idea that people are born with needs, that needs can be translated into rights, that these rights can be translated into entitlements, is a development of the modem world and it's reasonable, it's acceptable, it's obvious only for people who have had some of their educational needs awakened or created, then satisfied, and then learned that they have less than others. Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.

People , School , Way , History

“If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

The Echo of Greece (1957)
Context: What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business, possessed of great wealth, in which all citizens had a right to share... Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result... If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.

Life , Men , Freedom , Dependency

“Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics, have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.)
The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 84-85

Money , Children , Books , World

“She was fiercely protective of her husband's image, less so of her own, and she paid the price.”

Eleanor Clift (1940) American journalist

Farewell to Hollywood's Great White House Romance (2016)
Context: Nancy Reagan became first lady during the height of the feminist movement, and women who were battling for their rights in a male-dominated world saw her as an anachronism. Reagan said her life began when she met her husband. The adoring look she focused on her Ronnie when they were in public became known as "the gaze," adding to the caricature of her as a rich Hollywood socialite who did not understand the concerns of a generation of women coming into their own as professionals and seeking equality.
What her detractors failed to understand (and I was among them) was the substantive role she played behind the scenes at the White House in keeping her husband's presidency on track. She took the long view in looking after his legacy, intervening through favored surrogates to keep conservative ideologues from driving the agenda. Her insistence that no president could be considered great without reaching out to Soviet leaders trumped resistance from the right wing of the GOP.
She was fiercely protective of her husband's image, less so of her own, and she paid the price. When some of her interventions became known, particularly in the personnel department, she was cast as Lady Macbeth — even though the firings she engineered won praise. … Years later, with the benefit of hindsight and after watching Hillary Clinton's failed effort to achieve health-care reform, I came to believe Nancy Reagan deserved a fairer assessment. I wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in The Washington Post on Jan. 8, 1995, with the headline "Nancy with the centrist face: Derided as an elitist, Mrs. Reagan's impact was unequaled." I made the point that unlike Clinton, who took an office in the West Wing and was upfront about wanting to be a player, Reagan operated undercover, usually through a surrogate, and that she was a force for good. She rarely left fingerprints, but she got the job done, and her job was to play up her husband's strengths and cover for his weaknesses. She did both very well.
The piece concluded with this line: "She is without doubt an effective First Lady, and she may yet win our hearts." Soon after I received a handwritten note from Mrs. Reagan saying, "I don't really know how to say this but when something very nice comes from an unexpected source, it's really appreciated — and if you see me in a different light now, I'm happy. I can only hope one day 'to win the heart.' " Later that same year, she cooperated with a NEWSWEEK cover about her reconciliation with daughter Patti Davis, and how the president's Alzheimer's disease had brought the family together after literally decades of turmoil. Another handwritten note arrived shortly after with the lighthearted comment, "We've got to stop meeting like this!" After sharing her thoughts and emotions on her family's difficult times, Reagan said, "Hopefully I'm close to 'winning the heart.' "
In looking back at these notes, I realize how much it meant to her to gain a measure of affection after being treated so harshly in the public eye.

“This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

The Rickover Effect (1992)
Context: Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.

“I'm amazed by how compliant people are in this country. They go into service stations - 'cathedrals of despair', as I call them - where baseball-capped ghouls of the night lord it over their congealed bean kingdoms, their fried-bread twilights, their neon demi-mondes, tempting you to enter to become them, undead. "Ooh, beans on toast, £18.95, very reasonable. Oh no, I'm not going to complain. They probably pump them up from London in special tubes." God, £18.95? If that was the price, for my money, each bean would have to be carried over in a heron's beak and laid on an orchid and then placed on a very rare train set and carried all the way to my table on the train set and then pinged off by a tiny little rare vole and it rolls onto a beautiful silk leaf and I eat it with a Fabergé egg. Then you'd get your money's worth.
Ch. 16, 26:40”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Bewilderness (DVD, 2001)

Money , God , People , Beauty

“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

1770s, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" (1775)
Context: It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Life , God , Peace

“Never invest in a company with the target price for the stock in the name of the company.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part V, The Next Barrier, Fleece Bank Internet Conference 1999, p. 177.
Running Money (2004) First Edition
Context: I've been doing this for years. Never invest in a company with the target price for the stock in the name of the company.

“Since to open out
And mourn out grief, where it is possible
To draw a tear from the audience, is a work
That pays its own price well.”

Aeschylus Prometheus Bound

Source: Prometheus Bound, lines 637–639 (tr. Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Tear , Drawing

“There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.”

Thomas Tickell (1685–1740) English poet and man of letters

On the Death of Mr. Addison (1721), line 81. Compare: "He who should teach men to die, would at the same time teach them to live", Michel de Montaigne, Essay, book i. chap. ix.; "I have taught you, my dear flock, for above thirty years how to live; and I will show you in a very short time how to die", Sandys, Anglorum Speculum, p. 903; "Teach him how to live, And, oh still harder lesson! how to die", Beilby Porteus, Death, line 316; "He taught them how to live and how to die", Somerville, In Memory of the Rev. Mr. Moore.
Context: There patient show'd us the wise course to steer,
A candid censor, and a friend severe;
There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.

Knowledge

“We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we shall pay the price of war.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)
Context: The recommendations I have made represent the most urgent steps toward securing the peace and preventing war. We must be ready to take every wise and necessary step to carry out this great purpose. This will require assistance to other nations. It will require an adequate and balanced military strength. We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we shall pay the price of war. We in the United States remain determined to seek peace by every possible means, a just and honorable basis for the settlement of international issues.

War , Peace

“Different from a great part of the world, we in America persist in our belief in individual enterprise and in the profit motive; but we realize we must continually seek improved practices to insure the continuance of reasonable profits, together with scientific progress, individual initiative, opportunities for the little fellow, fair prices, decent wages and continuing employment.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Fireside Chat in the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards (1938)
Context: The Congress has provided a fact-finding Commission to find a path through the jungle of contradictory theories about wise business practices — to find the necessary facts for any intelligent legislation on monopoly, on price-fixing and on the relationship between big business and medium-sized business and little business. Different from a great part of the world, we in America persist in our belief in individual enterprise and in the profit motive; but we realize we must continually seek improved practices to insure the continuance of reasonable profits, together with scientific progress, individual initiative, opportunities for the little fellow, fair prices, decent wages and continuing employment.

World , Motivation , Parting

“We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

319 U.S. 641-42
Judicial opinions, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
Context: The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

“Walking on thin ice, I'm paying the price.
I'm throwing the dice in the air.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

"Walking On Thin Ice" on Season of Glass (1981) - YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1DHm7p1sm4
Context: Walking on thin ice, I'm paying the price.
I'm throwing the dice in the air.
Why must we learn it the hard way
And play the game of life with your heart?

“I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes, the various elements in short, which constitute or affect the price of agricultural produce.”

Robert Peel (1788–1850) British Conservative statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1839/mar/15/corn-laws-adjourned-debate-fourth-night in the House of Commons (15 March 1839).

Reading

“In any country, however new and vast, it would be possible to change "scarcity of labor" into "scarcity of employment" by increasing the price put on the use of land.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Source: How to Help the Unemployed (1894), p. 182
Context: In any country, however new and vast, it would be possible to change "scarcity of labor" into "scarcity of employment" by increasing the price put on the use of land. If three families settled a virgin continent, one family could command the services of the others as laborers for hire just as fully as though they were its chattel slaves, if it was accorded the ownership of the land and could put its own price on its use. Wakefield proposed only that land should be held at what he called "a sufficient price "— that is, a price high enough to keep wages in new colonies only a little higher than wages in the mother-country, and to produce not actual inability to get employment on the part of laborers, but only such difficulty as would keep them tractable, and ready to accept what from his standpoint were reasonable wages. Yet it is evident that it would only require a somewhat greater increase in the price of land to go beyond this point and to bring about in the midst of abundant natural opportunities for the employment of labor, the phenomena of laborers vainly seeking employment. Now, in the United States we have not attempted to create "scarcity of employment" by Wakefield's plan. But we have made haste by sale and gift to put the public domain in the hands of private owners, and thus allowed speculation to bring about more quickly and effectually than he could have anticipated, more than Wakefield aimed at. The public domain is now practically gone; land is rising to European prices, and we are at last face to face with social difficulties which in the youth of men of my time we were wont to associate with "the effete monarchies of the Old World."

Change , Country

“Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things”

Amelia Earhart (1897–1937) American aviation pioneer and author

Poetry written around the time of the breaking of her "tenuous engagement" to Samuel Chapman (c. 1928), published in Amelia, My Courageous Sister : Biography of Amelia Earhart (1987) by Muriel Earhart Morrissey and Carol L. Osborne, p. 74; also in Amelia : A Life of the Aviation Legend (1999) by Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, p. 38
Context: Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.

Life , Peace , Soul , Courage

“Be indigestible, hard, ungiving.
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.”

H.D. (1886–1961) American Imagist poet

The Walls Do Not Fall.

“Equilibrium itself has rarely been observed in real life — market prices have a notorious habit of fluctuating.”

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

The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (1987)
Context: Economic theory is devoted to the study of equilibrium positions. The concept of equilibrium is very useful. It allows us to focus on the final outcome rather than the process that leads up to it. But the concept is also very deceptive. It has the aura of something empirical: since the adjustment process is supposed to lead to an equilibrium, an equilibrium position seems somehow implicit in our observations. That is not true. Equilibrium itself has rarely been observed in real life — market prices have a notorious habit of fluctuating.

Life

“One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of the great pain. … Or so says the legend.”

Colleen McCullough book The Thorn Birds

Epigraph, The Thorn Birds (1977)
Context: There is a legend about a bird that sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. Dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of the great pain. … Or so says the legend.

God , Pain , World , Smile

“I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.”

Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) American–Canadian journalist, author on urbanism and activist (1916-2006)

Political questionnaire response (1952)
Context: I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought. I am grateful for that upbringing.

“The chief wrong which false prophets do to their following is not financial… But the real harm is on the mental and spiritual plane. There are those who hunger and thirst after higher values which they feel wanting in their humdrum lives. They live in mental confusion or moral anarchy, and seek vaguely for truth and beauty and moral support. When they are deluded and then disillusioned, cynicism and confusion follow. The wrong of these things, as I see it, is not in the money the victims part with half so much as in the mental and spiritual poison they get. But that is precisely the thing the Constitution put beyond the reach of the prosecutor, for the price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

The bolded section is often incorrectly reported as "The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish".
78 U.S. 94-95
Judicial opinions, United States v. Ballard (1944)

Money , Hunger , Truth , Religion

“…if wheat were at this moment subject to a duty of twenty shillings the quarter, and if Indian corn were virtually excluded, next winter would not pass without a convulsion endangering the whole frame of society, without the humiliation of constituted authorities forced to yield after a disgraceful struggle…if their [the Protectionists] advice had been taken, we should have had famine prices for many articles, and a state of exasperated public feeling and just agitation, which it would require wiser heads than theirs to allay. So far from regretting the expulsion from office, I rejoice in it as the greatest relief from an intolerable burden. To have your own way, and to be for five years the Minister of this country in the House of Commons, is quite enough for any man's strength. He is entitled to his discharge, from length of service. But to have to incur the deepest responsibility, to bear the heaviest toil, to reconcile colleagues with conflicting opinions to a common course of action, to keep together in harmony the Sovereign, the Lords and the Commons; to have to do these things, and to be at the same time the tool of a party—that is to say, to adopt the opinions of men who have not access to your knowledge, and could not profit by it if they had, who spend their time in eating and drinking, and hunting, shooting, gambling, horse-racing, and so forth—would be an odious servitude, to which I will never submit. I determine to keep aloof from party combinations.”

Robert Peel (1788–1850) British Conservative statesman

Letter to Lord Hardinge (24 September, 1846).
Charles Stuart Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers. Volume III (London: John Murray, 1899), pp. 473-474.

Men , Way , Feeling , Drink

“I do not expect to get near the worth of him; but cannot think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the prices of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, and worthy the pursuit of every human being”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to James Madison, Sr. (8 September 1783) https://books.google.com/books?id=-IrnXiH2lbAC&pg=PA11&dq=%22Madison%22+%22coveting+that+liberty+for+which+we+have+paid%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAGoVChMI_ab6o9vWxwIVCmg-Ch1jIgiE#v=onepage&q=%22Madison%22%20%22coveting%20that%20liberty%20for%20which%20we%20have%20paid%22&f=false
1780s
Context: On a view of all circumstances I have judged it most prudent not to force Billey back to Virginia even if it could be done; and have accordingly taken measures for his final separation from me. I am persuaded his mind is too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virginia. The laws here do not admit of his being sold for more than 7 years. I do not expect to get near the worth of him; but cannot think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the prices of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, and worthy the pursuit of every human being.

Thinking

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

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

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

“Think you to be a philosopher while acting as you do? think you to go on thus eating, thus drinking, giving way in like manner to [your own] wrath and to displeasure? Nay you must watch, you must labor; overcome certain desires; quit your familiar friends, submit to be despised by your slave, to be held in derision by them that meet you, to take the lower place in all things, in office, in positions of authority, in courts of law. Weight these things fully, and then, if you will, lay to your hand; if as the price of these things you would gain Freedom, Tranquility, and passionless Serenity.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

104
Golden Sayings of Epictetus

Law , Way , Drink , Thinking

“Service in this business is tough and often dangerous. It extracts a price for participants, and that price can be high.”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Retirement ceremony, Friday, 23 July 2010, as quoted in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/us/24mcchrystal.html.
2010
Context: Service in this business is tough and often dangerous. It extracts a price for participants, and that price can be high. It is tempting to protect yourself from the personal and professional cost of loss by limiting how much you commit, how much you believe and trust in people, and how deeply you care… If I had it to do over again, I’ d do some things in my career differently, but not many. I believed in people and I still believe in them. I trusted and I still trust. I cared and I still care. I wouldn’ t have had it any other way.

Business

“It is better to know — even if the knowledge endured only for the moment that comes before destruction — than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

The New Hugo Winners: Award-winning Science Fiction Stories Vol. 1 (1989), p. 215
General sources
Context: We are meant to know, or we are amoebae.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know — and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves?
Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know — even if the knowledge endured only for the moment that comes before destruction — than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

Life , Knowledge , Universe

“These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

Gene Kranz (1933) NASA Flight Director and manager

Address to his branch and flight control team on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster (30 January 1967), known as "The Kranz Dictum"; as published in Failure Is Not An Option : Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (2000) by Gene Kranz, p. 204. The phrase "tough and competent" was echoed by NASA Director Sean O'Keefe following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, adding that "these words are the price of admission to the ranks of NASA, and we should adopt it that way."
Context: Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.
We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, "Dammit, stop!"
I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: "Tough and Competent." Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.
Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.
When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write "Tough and Competent" on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

“It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that characterized the crisis.”

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

"Epilogue", p. 512.
2000s, The Age of Turbulence (2008)
Context: Much of the securitization took the form of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) with senior credit tranches certified by rating agencies as AAA. It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that characterized the crisis.

Failure

“I paid the price for that, but it was worth it, to speak the truth. The Zionists have to understand that's their country, too. Palestinians were there long before any European Zionists.”

Helen Thomas (1920–2013) American author and journalist

Truth , Understanding , Country

“Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying.”

Norman Lamont (1942) British politician

Hansard, HC 6Ser vol 191 col 413 (16 May 1991) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199091/cmhansrd/1991-05-16/Orals-1.html.

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.
Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter V, p. 38.

Money

Quotes about pricing page 12

Quotes about pricing
page 12