Quotes & Sayings About Commodities

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating. — Adam Smith

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor. — Margaret Chan

Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable ... it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked. — Friedrich Hayek

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. — Herbert Marcuse

My teeth were nice commodities, and I did enjoy having kidneys, but I'd give them all away if someone threatened to take my Slayer albums from me. — Christopher Krovatin

The World is currently facing a confluence of mounting shortages in three commodities essential to the continuance of human life on this planet: water, energy, and food. Those three elements combine into something much greater than the sum of its parts, a looming global disaster by 2030. By 2030 the demand for water will increase by 30 percent, while demands for both energy and food will shoot up 50 percent. All this will be driven by a global population increase to about 8 billion people, placing tremendous stress on our highly industrialized global food system. — John L. Casti

The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses. — David Harvey

Self-awareness is one of the rarest of human commodities. I don't mean self-consciousn ess where you're limiting and evaluating yourself. I mean being aware of your own patterns. — Tony Robbins

Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I've made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action. — Jim Rogers

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money. — Karl Marx

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. — Edward R. Murrow

For it is the very commodities selected for maximum price-fixing that the regulators most want to keep in abundant supply. But when they limit the wages and the profits of those who make these commodities, without also limiting the wages and profits of those who make luxuries or semiluxuries, they discourage the production of the price-controlled necessities while they relatively stimulate the production of less essential goods. — Henry Hazlitt

Every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches. — David Hume

Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system? If so, — Charles Eisenstein

The exchangeable value of all commodities, rises as the difficulties of their production increase. — David Ricardo

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time. — Karl Marx

Many tradesmen export their best commodities
the Christian should not. He should have all his conversation everywhere of the best savour; but let him have a care to put forth the sweetest fruit of spiritual life and testimony in his own family. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

So, you used to come up here, too, and escape all the girl drama?" I said and chuckled when his cheeks turned a little red.
"Nah," he refuted. "It was always these two the girls wanted. The Jacobsons are hot commodities around here."
"Bull crap! You had them eating up those stupid 'I'm a cowboy' stories and you know it," Kyle yelled. "The one about you saving your sister from the bull was classic. Classic!"
"Eat me," Rodney said, embarrassed. — Shelly Crane

Historically, there has been a bull market in commodities every 20 or 30 years. — Jim Rogers

Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving, and receiving. — Ludwig Von Mises

we will never be truly capable of 'loving our neighbour' as long as we continue to view the people around us as commodities, capital or competition — Tristan Sherwin

To maximise output, every organisation will strive to obtain its necessary raw materials, labour and machinery at the lowest possible cost and combine them to turn out a product that it will then attempt to sell at the highest possible price ... And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other commodities, a difference that conventional economics does not have a means of representing or giving weight to but that is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: that labour feels pain. — Alain De Botton

Plastics. Polyesters. Resins. Ersatz - industrial uses. Do you see? No consumers' commodities. — Philip K. Dick

Millions of our fellow human beings continue to live as contemporary slaves, victims of abominable practices like human trafficking, forced labour and sexual exploitation. Countless children are forced to become soldiers, work in sweat shops or are sold by desperate families. Women are brutalized and traded like commodities. Entire households and villages labour under debt bondage. — Ban Ki-moon

Currencies are things that you use to pay for other things; commodities are things that you buy. If art is going to be one or the other, it's going to be a commodity, not a currency. — Felix Salmon

Axiom: that illness isn't productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it's an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it. — Margaret Atwood

If the world economy is going to revive, I believe commodities
are going to lead it back up. If the world economy is not going to
revive, commodities are still the place to be - especially with governments
printing so much money. Look at the 1970s. The world
economy was in the tank, but commodities did very well. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and restrict his cash holdings to minimum size ... If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns to crack-up boom: the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders. — Ludwig Von Mises

In a world of increasing interdependence, energy security will depend much on how countries manage their relations with one another. That is why energy security will be one of the main challenges of foreign policy in the years ahead. Oil and gas have always been political commodities. — Daniel Yergin

Respect, that most prized of commodities, came from achievement. The better you did - the — Jon Meacham

The demand for commodities is not the demand for labor. — John Stuart Mill

I have an eccentric view on commodities not necessarily shared by my colleagues - or by almost anybody. And that is, we're running out of everything. — Jeremy Grantham

As a rule, however, an increase in the value of money spreads only gradually. The first of those who have to content themselves with lower prices than before for the commodities they sell, while they still have to pay the old higher prices for the commodities they buy, are those who are injured by the increase in the value of money. Those, however, who are the last to have to reduce the prices of the commodities they sell, and have meanwhile been able to take advantage of the fall in the prices of other things, are those who profit by the change. — Ludwig Von Mises

The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Ships are a strange kind of commodity because they're very lumpy, very big individual units, but they're commodities. — Wilbur Ross

In the professional world of leadership ambition and potential are the most excessive commodities. — Noel DeJesus

I have no way and therefore want no eyes
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen
our means secure us, and our mere defects
prove our commodities. — William Shakespeare

Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation. — Adam Smith

A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are used by the poorest members of society: grain, bread, beer, wine, clothing, and all other staples without which human life could not exist. — Desiderius Erasmus

The government desires to purchase; it desires to use the market, not to disorganize it. But the officially-fixed price does disorganize the market in which commodities and services are bought and sold for money. Commerce, so far as it is able, seeks relief in other ways. It re-develops a system of direct exchange, in which commodities and services are exchanged without the instrumentality of money. Those who are forced to dispose of commodities and services at the fixed prices do not dispose of them to everybody, but merely to those to whom they wish to do a favour. Would-be purchasers wait in long queues in order to snap up what they can get before it is too late; they race breathlessly from shop to shop, hoping to find one that is not yet sold out. — Ludwig Von Mises

These are the lords
That have bought titles: men may merchandise
Wares, ay and traffic in all commodities
From sea to sea, and from shore to shore:
But in my thought, of all things that are sold,
'Tis pity honor should be bought for gold:
It cuts off all desert. — Eliza Haywood

Beneath the dream of fame, another dream, a dream of no longer dissolving and staying dissolved in the grey, faceless and insipid mass of commodities, a dream of turning into a notable, noticed and coveted commodity, a talked about commodity, a commodity standing out from the mass of commodities, a commodity impossible to overlook, to deride, to be dismissed. In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made. — Zygmunt Bauman

Lyotard addresses... in Postmodern Fables... [that] ideas of difference, alterity and multiculturalism have become nothing more than streams of cultural capital, streams which themselves fashion, and are fashioned by, the demands of the global market. Hence, the following irony: 'What cultural capitalism has found is the marketplace of singularities'. The result of this discovery, which even reduces the 'postmodern' celebration of difference or otherness to a marketable strategy, is that ideas are stripped of their intrinsic value (value-rationality) and are judged by their value as commodities. This leads to the production of thought that is itself devoid of difference, for streams of cultural capital 'must all go in the right direction' and 'must converge'. Global capitalism, while appearing to affirm the potentiality of cultural differentiation, in fact subordinates difference and alterity to an instrumental logic of exchange, performance and control. — Nicholas Gane

Let us now leave the example of the isolated State and turn our attention to the international movements that arise from a fall in the value of money due to an increase in its amount. Here, again, the process is the same. There is no increase in the available stock of goods; only its distribution is altered. The country in which the new mines are situated and the countries that deal directly with it have their position bettered by the fact that they are still able to buy commodities from other countries at the old lower prices at a time when depreciation at home has already occurred. Those countries that are the last to be reached by the new stream of money are those which must ultimately bear the cost of the increased welfare of the other countries. — Ludwig Von Mises

When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser's country, since these are of value only in the country of issue. — Carroll Quigley

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else's. — Michael Pollan

The world wants India to remain an import-based economy. Then India can be a dumping ground where gold can be dumped and other commodities such as oil and gas. They look at India as a huge market. — Anil Agarwal

It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general. (142) — David Harvey

It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important - a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes. He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humourless, particularly in dealing with Congress. ( ... ) Kennedy had a detached and even donnish willingness to grant a merit in the other fellow's argument. Johnson is not so inclined to retreat and grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new administration but it works. The lovers of style are not too happy with the new administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining. — Robert A. Caro

Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited. — James Gibbons

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. — Mark Kurlansky

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. — Erich Fromm

Medicines are unusual commodities. Important drugs can save the lives and protect the health of millions. Their consumption can bring huge benefits, by helping patients to avoid infection and preventing serious damage to the economies of families, nations and even humanity at large. — Thomas Pogge

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. — Adam Smith

Google created Google+ as its effort to steal Facebook's oxygen, but it turns out that social networks aren't commodities. — Bruce Sterling

The facility of obtaining food is beneficial in two ways to the owners of capital, it at the same time raises profits and increases the amount of consumable commodities. — David Ricardo

But a rise in the wages of labour would not equally affect commodities produced with machinery quickly consumed, and commodities produced with machinery slowly consumed. — David Ricardo

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. — Fred Brooks

What is the free market? Well, the free market, [we're told] is really a terrible, inhuman kind of arrangement, because it treats people like commodities. But how does the government treat people? Like garbage-worse than garbage. Not like commodities, but like nothing. We libertarians understand that we are not humane, we are not compassionate. It's the leftists and the liberals, they're the ones who are human and compassionate, but you'd better not get in their way. — Ralph Raico

It is important to realize that gold and silver are international commodities and that, therefore, when not prohibited by government decree, foreign coins are perfectly capable of serving as standard moneys. — Murray Rothbard

Let's embrace productive capitalism, not casino capitalism, by restoring transparency and true competition in the commodities markets. — Maria Cantwell

Over time, there's a very close correlation between what happens to the dollar and what happens to the price of oil. When the dollar gets week, the price of oil, which, as you know, and other commodities are denominated in dollars, they go up. We saw it in the '70s, when the dollar was savagely weakened. — Steve Forbes

If the gains from trade in commodities are substantial, they are small compared to trade in ideas — David Landes

The positive aspect of my negative view is essentially that you shouldn't own cash and government bonds, but you should be in assets like real estate or equities or precious metals or in commodities. — Marc Faber

Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It's time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things." "You're talking like a Stalinist!" I cried. "People don't get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then they use whatever's left over to buy themselves nice things that make them feel less bad about having jobs! — Paul Murray

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned. — John Dewey

It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. The capitalist system does not recognize any forms of consumer other than those who can pay, if we exclude the consumption of paupers and swindlers. The fact that commodities are unsaleable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them, i.e. no consumers (no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption). — Karl Marx

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators. — Sol LeWitt

Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys. — John Dewey

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. — John Lukacs

No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they're commodities - we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice. — Sarah Ruhl

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings. — Erich Fromm

The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God's people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as "hands" in the service of a command economy. Rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness. All of that is implicit in the reality and exhibit of divine rest. — Walter Brueggemann

Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that has withdrawn the element of time from journeying, has also withdrawn the reality of space. — Tom McDonough

Sisterhood is powerful. Woman can support each other as women, in their pursuit for enlightenment or anything else, without fear. But as long as she's still in the commodities exchange market, buying and selling, she must fear the competition. — Frederick Lenz

The problem is that humans have victimized animals to such a degree that they are not even considered victims. They are not even considered at all. They are nothing. They don't count; they don't matter; they're commodities like TV sets and cell phones. We have actually turned animals into inanimate objects - sandwiches and shoes. — Gary Yourofsky

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. — Karl Marx

I don't think you should invest in commodities. Eddie Murphy made it seem risky in Trading Places. — Eugene Mirman

Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state. — Alexander Hamilton

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available. — Jonathan Kozol

If one fourth of the capital of a country were suddenly destroyed, or entirely transferred to a different part of the world, without any other cause occurring of a diminished demand for commodities, this scantiness of capital would certainly occasion great inconvenience to consumers, and great distress among the working classes; but it would be attended with great advantages to the remaining capitalists. — Thomas Malthus

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

A lot of very successful businessmen share some of these sociopathic traits - a lack of empathy, seeing people as commodities, projecting an air of sincerity when everything is actually calculated. — Oscar Isaac

When you look at a commodities market you need hedgers and speculators. If you don't have one, you don't have a market. That's how it works. — T. Boone Pickens

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost. — Ludwig Von Mises

There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Passive commerce ... should thus ... [compel us] to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us, to enrich our enemies and persecutors. That unequalled spirit of enterprise ... an inexhaustible mine of national wealth, would be stifled and lost; and poverty and disgrace would overspread a country, which, with wisdom, might make herself the admiration and envy of the world. — Alexander Hamilton

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities. — Herbert Marcuse

John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it. — Lierre Keith

I have come to the conclusion that silence and time are the most precious commodities. — Eloisa James

Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears. — Jacques Roux

It has therefore been justly observed that however honestly the coin of a country may conform to its standard, money made of gold and silver is still liable to fluctuations in value, not only to accidental, and temporary, but to permanent and natural variations, in the same manner as other commodities. — David Ricardo

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. — Edward Bernays

Even if index numbers cannot fulfill the demands that theory has to make, they can still, in spite of their fundamental shortcomings and the inexactness of the methods by which they are actually determined, perform useful workaday services for the politician. If we have no other aim in view than the comparison of points of time that lie close to one another, then the errors that are involved in every method of calculating numbers may be so far ignored as to allow us to draw certain rough conclusions from them. Thus, for example, it becomes possible to a certain extent to span the temporal gap that lies, in a period of variation in the value of money, between movements of Stock Exchange rates and movements of the purchasing power that is expressed in the prices of commodities. — Ludwig Von Mises

Bicycling beyond the Divide did what all great books do: it told me about me. In its tale of a journey made by two different men-both of them Daryl Farmer-this book offers us not only moving vistas and meaningful people, but also hope, that rarest of literary commodities these days. I didn't want this to end. — Bret Lott

Yet I do seriously and on good grounds affirm it possible to make a flying chariot in which a man may sit and give such a motion unto it as shall convey him through the air. And this perhaps might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum and commodities for traffic. — John Wilkins

As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value. — Karl Marx

It is my belief ... that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes. — Doris Lessing

Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only. — Adam Smith