Quotations on the Marketplace
by Megan L. Stivison
It is curious – curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will not only beat a path to his door, it will make newsreels of him and his wife in beach pajamas, it will discuss his diet and his health, it will publish heart-throb stories of his love life.
Newman Levy
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
That which costs little is less valued.
Miguel De Cervantes (1547 – 1616)
You will be as much value to others as you have been to yourself.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE)
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
Thomas Paine (1737 — 1809)
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
Gloria Steinem
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951)
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900), Lady Windermere’s Fan
He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), DAVID Copperfield
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965), Of Human Bondage
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Well, and about the business of the agora, dealings, and the ordinary dealings between man and man, or again about agreements with the commencement with artisans; about insult and injury, of the commencement of actions, and the appointment of juries, what would you say? There may also arise questions about any impositions and extractions of market and harbor dues which may be required, and in general about the regulations of markets, police, harbors, and the like. But, oh heavens! Shall we condescend to legislate on any of these particulars?
I think, he said, that there is no need to impose laws about them on good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for themselves.
Socrates and Adeimantus, in The Republic by Plato
translated by Benjamin Jowett
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for ten years.
Warren Buffett
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
Rudyard Kipling (1865 –1936), “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919)
A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
Yogi Berra
Wherefore, O youth, choose with confidence, me, the better cause, and you will learn to hate the Agora, and to refrain from baths, and to be ashamed of what is disgraceful, and to be enraged if any one jeer you, and to rise up from seats before your seniors when they approach, and not to behave ill toward your parents, and to do nothing else that is base, because you are to form in your mind an image of Modesty:
Aristophanes, The Clouds, TRANSLATED by William James Hickie
[Statues of the god] were distributed throughout Athens, and always in the most conspicuous locations, standing beside outer doors of private houses as well as temples, at the intersections of crossways; in the public agora. They were thus present to the eye of every Athenian in all his acts of intercommunion, either for business or pleasure, with his fellow-citizens.
Joel Dorman Steele, Esther Baker Steele, and John Heyl Vincent Brief History of Greece
The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have — and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.
Paul Heyne (1931-2000)
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.
Robert Quillen (1887 -1948)
STRANGER! If you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), LEAVES of Grass
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods / moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former / but no opinion.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.
Jane Goodall
Having a good discussion is like having riches.
Kenyan Proverb
The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874 –1948)
October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
Mark Twain
