Quotes about pricing
page 5

Michael Badnarik photo
Tony Abbott photo

“If you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax?”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Originally stated in an interview with Sky News and Subsequently quoted in " http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/abbott-dogged-by-old-carbon-comment-20110606-1fprb.html#ixzz47O9mBz9O on smh.com.au, July 15, 2009
2009

Muhammad bin Qasim photo

“Muhammad Kasim marched from Dhalila, and encamped on the banks of the stream of the Jalwali to the east of Brahmanabad. He sent some confidential messengers to Brahmanabad to invite its people to submission and to the Muhammadan faith, to preach to them Islam, to demand the Jizya, or poll-tax, and also to inform them that if they would not submit, they must prepare to fight…
They sent their messengers, and craved for themselves and their families exemption from death and captivity. Muhammad Kasim granted them protection on their faithful promises, but put the soldiers to death, and took all their followers and dependents prisoners. All the captives, up to about thirty years of age, who were able to work, he made slaves, and put a price upon them…
When the plunder and the prisoners of war were brought before Kasim, and enquiries were made about every captive, it was found that Ladi, the wife of Dahir, was in the fort with two daughters of his by his other wives. Veils were put on their faces, and they were delivered to a servant to keep them apart. One-fifth of all the prisoners were chosen and set aside; they were counted as amounting to twenty thousand in number, and the rest were given to the soldiers. Protection was given to the artificers, the merchants, and the common people, and those who had been seized from those classes were all liberated. But he (Kasim) sat on the seat of cruelty, and put all those who had fought to the sword. It is said that about six thousand fighting men were slain, but, according to some, sixteen thousand were killed, and the rest were pardoned.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Source: The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume I, p. 176-181. ( also quoted in Bostom, A. G. M. D., & Bostom, A. G. (2010). The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus.) note: Quotes from The Chach Nama

Ben Jonson photo
Milton Friedman photo
Rembrandt van Rijn photo

“I am most astonished by what has been written about the [painting] 'Alexander', which is so well done that I must suppose there are not many lovers of art [amatori] at Messina. I am also surprised that Your Lordship [Don Antonio Ruffo] should complain as much about the price as about the canvas, but if Your Lordship wishes to return it as he did the sketch [schizzo] of Homer, I will do another Alexander... If Your Lordship likes the Alexander as is, very well. If he does not want to keep it, six hundred florins remain outstanding. And for the Homer [painting] five hundred florins plus the expenses of canvas, it being understood that everything is at Your Lordship's expense. Having agreed to it, would he kindly send me his desired measurements. Awaiting the response to settle the matter.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

Quote of Rembrandt's letter, Nov/Dec. 1662, to buyer Don Antonio Ruffo from Messina, Sicily (location: RD, 1662/12, 509); as quoted in Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama, Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, NEW YORK 1999, p. 591, & notes 32-36
Rembrant's reaction after complaints of Don Antonio Ruffo, dispatched through the Dutch consul in Messina, Jan van den Broeck, who was on his way to Amsterdam. Once there he was to inform Isaac Just (presumably the intermediary between Rembrandt and the Messina patrician), of the intense dissatisfaction at the work, which Don Ruffo had received. 'The Alexander', he complained, being unacceptably stitched together from four separate pieces, showed seams which were 'too horrible for words.'..g with so many defects.. (Don Ruffo already bought Rembrandt's painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer c. 1655 and still existing: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_Aristotle_with_a_Bust_of_Homer_-_WGA19232.jpg, but 'The Alexander' of Rembrandt is lost).
1640 - 1670

Neil Gorsuch photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Gebran Tueni photo

“It is time for us to put an end to our fear for which we paid a very heavy price, to face all the lies of the Syrian security regime.”

Gebran Tueni (1957–2005) journalist

Dec. 1, 2005, editorial in An-Nahar.
Attributed

Glenn Greenwald photo
Thomas Friedman photo
Jesse Klaver photo

“Those who are fleeing war and violence are entitled to protection and shelter. […] We want to govern, but not at any price. We want to create change. And to always continue seeing the people behind the policy.”

Jesse Klaver (1986) Dutch politician and trade union leader

a statement on Facebook after the fall of coalition talks, quoted by Deutsche Welle http://www.dw.com/en/netherlands-coalition-government-negotiations-fail-again/a-39228806

“When the barbarians are at the gates, interest rates rise and bond prices fall precipitously.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 1, No Guts, No Glory, p. 13.

Thomas Hobbes photo
Paul Krugman photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo

“Error is the price we pay for progress.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Calvin Coolidge photo

“No more important development has taken place in the last year than the beginning of a restoration of agriculture to a prosperous condition. We must permit no division of classes in this country, with one occupation striving to secure advantage over another. Each must proceed under open opportunities and with a fair prospect of economic equality. The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat. Every business has its risk and its times of depression. It is well known that in the long run there will be a more even prosperity and a more satisfactory range of prices under the natural working out of economic laws than when the Government undertakes the artificial support of markets and industries. Still we can so order our affairs, so protect our own people from foreign competition, so arrange our national finances, so administer our monetary system, so provide for the extension of credits, so improve methods of distribution, as to provide a better working machinery for the transaction of the business of the Nation with the least possible friction and loss. The Government has been constantly increasing its efforts in these directions for the relief and permanent establishment of agriculture on a sound and equal basis with other business.”

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)

Steve Keen photo

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

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

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

Stendhal photo
Edmund Phelps photo
Julius Streicher photo

“It is a trial within a nation but a trial of victors against the vanquished. Even before the trials started, the victors who are our judges were quite convinced that we were guilty and that we should all pay the price.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn, June 15, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Charles Stross photo
Paul Krugman photo
Marc Randazza photo
George W. Bush photo
George W. Bush photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Douglas Coupland photo
Ron Paul photo
Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert photo

“The time of Christians is the price with which they purchase eternity.”

Source: An Essay on Old Age, 1732, p. 121

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Harold Holt photo

“Australia has, in its short history, paid a heavy price in human life in the cause of liberty and national survival. No one can foretell what the price will be in South-east Asia.”

Harold Holt (1908–1967) Australian politician, 17th Prime Minister of Australia

statement on the death of Private Errol Noack, first Australian conscript killed in Vietnam, 25 May 1966
As prime minister
Source: The Life and Death of Harold Holt, p. 180.

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

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

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

George W. Bush photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
David Ricardo photo

“for price is everywhere regulated by the return obtained by this last portion of capital, for which no rent whatever is paid.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter XXIV, The Rent of Land, p. 220

Arun Jaitley photo

“When the international prices rise, we expect the government to cut its share of profit and its revenue earnings and share the burden of the increase with the common man.”

Arun Jaitley (1952–2019) Indian politician

Responding to fuel price raise by the UPA government, as quoted in " India announces fuel price rise http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4219582.stm", BBC News (6 September 2005)

Salman Rushdie photo
Paul A. Samuelson photo

“In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become infinite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties.”

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 5 : Theory of Consumer’s Behavior

Yevgeny Yevtushenko photo

“The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

"Lies" (1952), line 11; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 52.

J.M. Coetzee photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Sound file (13 September 2001) http://www.wavsource.com/news/20010911a.htm
Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

Sören Kierkegaard photo
David Lloyd George photo
Nico Perrone photo
Muammar Gaddafi photo
Will Eisner photo
David Ogilvy photo
Emma Goldman photo
J. William Fulbright photo

“The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

"The Price of Empire" speech, to the meeting of the American Bar Association in Hawaii (August 1967), in Haynes Bonner Johnson and Bernard M. Gwertzman, Fulbright: The Dissenter (1968), p. 305.

Robert E. Howard photo

“…today everything is commercialized--politics, religion, education, ideology, belief, the armed services. …Everything has its price.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Friedrich Engels photo
Ragnar Frisch photo

“Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces.”

James Agate (1877–1947) British diarist and critic

Ego, p. 276, March 10, 1933.

Murray Leinster photo

“It isn’t illegal to buy an artist’s work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!”

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Time Tunnel (1964), Chapter 2 (p. 21).

Friedrich Hayek photo
Najib Razak photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Yuval Noah Harari photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Frederick Winslow Taylor photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Harold Demsetz photo
Barry Boehm photo
David Ricardo photo

“A BOUNTY on the exportation of corn tends to lower its price to the foreign consumer, but it has no permanent effect on its price in the home market.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter XXII, Bounties and Prohibitions, p. 201

Eugene V. Debs photo
Peter D. Schiff photo

“Real economic growth emanates from increased productivity, which tends to hold prices down.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

Joxe Azurmendi photo

“The price of freedom is to decide moral and political issues.”

Joxe Azurmendi (1941) Basque writer

Interview in Deia (1 September 2012)

David Berg photo
Robert Walpole photo

“All those men have their price.”

Robert Walpole (1676–1745) British statesman

Prime Minister
Source: Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), stating "'All men have their price' is commonly ascribed to Walpole", and citing Coxe, Memoirs of Walpole, Vol. iv, p. 369: "Flowery oratory he despised. He ascribed to the interested views of themselves or their relatives the declarations of pretended patriots, of whom he said, 'All those men have their price'".

Thomas Brooks photo
Friedrich Hayek photo
Pentti Linkola photo
David Ricardo photo
John Hicks photo
Edward Carson, Baron Carson photo

“There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Herodotus: History (p. 45)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Alexander H. Stephens photo

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

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

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

“If it hurt me to have to give up a painting I figured it had to hurt them to write the check. That's how I came up with the price for my work.”

Keariene Muizz (1977) American artist

Associated Press (2008); from an interview conducted by John Rogers.

David Orrell photo

“Adam Smith's invisible hand does exist, but as an emergent property of a complex system. It has a fuzzy tendency to reduce big price discrepancies, but it acts in a rather haphazard way.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 4, Right Versus Left, p. 135

Robert Jordan photo