Oil Price Quotes & Sayings

Economists believe there are three reasons why the Russian economy is doing so poorly. One, economic sanctions are working. Number two, low-price oil. And number three, Lindsay Lohan has quit drinking vodka. — David Letterman

The economic basis on which Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish nationalists made the case for separation was based on an oil price much higher than it is at the moment, so there will be no case for it. — Michael Gove

Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed. — Thomas Sowell

There's no free lunch. If you want an industrial economy, you need energy. If you want energy, it will produce pollution. You can have it in two forms. You can have it dissipated in the atmosphere - like carbon dioxide - which then you cannot recover, or you can have the waste concentrated in one small space like nuclear. That is far easier to deal with. The idea that you can be able to create renewable energy at a price anywhere near the current price for oil or gas or coal is a fantasy. — Charles Krauthammer

We think we're near energy independence - nothing could be further from the truth. We're in much better shape now, but the price of a barrel of oil is going to be controlled by the Middle East for the next 10, 20, 30 years for sure. — Michael Mullen

Like any business, the oil industry runs on the basic premise of supply and demand. The more supply - the lower the price. The higher the demand - the higher price. In other words, the more people who can buy oil, the higher the price of oil. — Ron Wyden

We will work to bring an element of stability to the price of oil. — Olusegun Obasanjo

If a war started, the oil price probably would go up, as you said, maybe $5, $6 a barrel until you saw other oil from the extra supplies that are available elsewhere coming into the world, into the market. — Daniel Yergin

The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be
through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business. — Ronald Reagan

I'm really into lip cream. I have this one by Hourglass: it's an oil with this gold-tip applicator, and it's schmancy-schmancy. When you get to the point that your lips are cracking, the price is worth it. — Anna Kendrick

The low price of oil is a headwind to investments in alternative energy technologies, but it will not stop them. — Carlos Ghosn

I will do my best to reduce the price of oil to expand the life span of oil at least for two decades or three decades. — Ahmed Zaki Yamani

You know, if we're going to bring down the price of gas, you have to have three things. You have to have a big reserve, you have to have the ability to develop oil out of that reserve quickly, and you have to be able to produce oil at a relatively low cost. — Chris Cannon

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

People who are running for office mislead the American people by saying that there's a three-point plan or a bumper sticker kind of way of bringing down gasoline prices. The fact of the matter is that nobody can do that. The price of oil is set on the global economy. People who have looked at this closely and hard know that's the case. — Ken Salazar

Petrol price is a deregulated commodity, price of which is decided by our oil marketing companies based on input cost and other parameters. — Veerappa Moily

Simply put, drilling in ANWR would be expensive, environmentally devastating, and would do very little to fix our energy crisis or to bring down the price of oil and gasoline. — Allyson Schwartz

Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they've become just another Wall Street plaything. — Gary Weiss

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms. — Michael Lewis

Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price. — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

I don't think we're going to see the price of oil going down in the near future, that's the reality. — Carly Fiorina

Controlled Middle East oil, it would control the world. This oil represents 65 percent of world oil reserves. Therefore, America believes if it squashed Iraq, it would control the oil of the Middle East and consequently hold the oil in its hands [and] fix its price the way it likes. — Saddam Hussein

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost
to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. — Michael Pollan

Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization. — Ida Tarbell

The oil companies are really making a very lucrative amount of profit from the high price of oil. I don't that they're very keen to reduce the price of oil. The consumers are those who are the victims so I think that the producers, the governments, some of them, they're enjoying the high revenue that they get. — Ahmed Zaki Yamani

The residents blamed the "Gahmen", naturally. Since the explosion of social media, those "Gahmen" guys have been blamed for everything from HDB flat prices to the price of oil, climate change, the shortage of Hello Kitty dolls and kids not clearing their trays away at hawker centres. — Neil Humphreys

A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened anxiety. — Daniel Yergin

First of all, I'm in favor of making price gouging a crime, and in fact, one the reasons I didn't vote for the Republican House version was because there were too many breaks for the oil companies. — Marty Meehan

I think that there's no question that, in Alberta as the price of oil continues to drop, that there are families ... that are worried about the instability that that brings to the economy. And so that has to be more and more front and centre in terms of the work that we do as a government. — Rachel Notley

To be sure, there exists in principle a quite simple economic mechanism that should restore equilibrium to the process: the mechanism of supply and demand. If the supply of any good is insufficient, and its price is too high, then demand for that good should decrease, which should lead to a decline in its price. In other words, if real estate and oil prices rise, then people should move to the country or take to traveling about by bicycle (or both). Never mind that such adjustments might be unpleasant or complicated; they might also take decades, during which landlords and oil well owners might well accumulate claims on the rest of the population so extensive that they could easily come to own everything that can be owned, including rural real estate and bicycles, once and for all.3 As always, the worst is never certain to arrive. It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar. — Thomas Piketty

The war on terrorism has made national security a legitimate concern, and a rising deficit, changes brought on by globalization and even the price of oil have thrown the nation's economic health into question. — Roger Mahony

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises. — Leontyne Price

Art is what we call ... the thing an artist does.
It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.
Art is not in the ... eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist. — Seth Godin

The one thing people seem to forget is the more oil we have, the lower the price and the lower the profits the oil companies make. — David Pratt

The price of imported oil in the US doubled between summer 2003 and summer 2005, reducing consumers' purchasing power by more than 1 per cent of gross domestic product. — Martin Feldstein

When you have a transportation system that the price of propellant is essentially negligible something is very wrong. If you look at any other transportation system, a car, a motorcycle, a train, an oil tanker, an airliner, you name it; about a quarter to a third of the operating cost is buying the propellant. — Burt Rutan

I started digging and found that Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates after the country had diversified their economy, instead of being solely oil-based. This diversification had brought about modernization. I realized that if you land the price of oil, countries will diversify their economies and as a result, modernize. — Shai Agassi

The owner actually tried the oil and chooses to carry it based on its taste. It's not about packaging, marketing, or price. It's about quality. He tried it and knew his store had to carry it. That's the approach you should take too. — Jason Fried

We don't need a fuel that's cleaner, we need a fuel that happens to be cleaner, but is half the price of oil. — Vinod Khosla

Think about the difference between how your local gas station and congressman respond to a spike in oil prices. One has the price placard outside changed to reflect the reality of the market within hours. The other sends out a press release, tries to organize a hearing, and at the end of amount accomplishes nothing. Meanwhile, the gas station has already made at least thirty additional adjustments to the realities of the market while your politico fails to get anything more than easy media. — Joel Miller

A variety of factors contribute to the price of gasoline in the United States. These factors include worldwide supply, demand and competition for crude oil, taxes, regional differences in access to gasoline supplies and environmental regulations. — Gary Miller

Quite frankly, I think nothing could do more to immediately bolster national security then enabling us to produce more oil and gas here at home at a price consumers could afford. — Phil Gramm

When the price of oil on the world market began to fall, the American business community and the public lost interest in the great energy crusade. Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, removed the solar panels from the White House roof and scrapped the wood-burning stove in the living quarters. America went back to business as usual, buying even larger gasguzzling vehicles, and using ever greater volumes of energy to support a wasteful, consumer-driven lifestyle. — Jeremy Rifkin

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil ... From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil ... Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices. If enough oil was held, or if the production fell off, up went the price, only to be knocked down by the throwing of great quantities of stocks on the market. — Ida Tarbell

Even if gas prices fall, consumers will continue to be gouged at the pump the only thing that we can be sure rises faster that the price of gasoline is the skyrocketing profits of oil companies. — Major Owens

So long as oil is used as a source of energy, when
the energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil becomes
greater than the energy content of the oil, production
will cease no matter what the monetary price may
be. — M. King Hubbert

For decades, our dependence on OPEC oil has dictated our national security decisions and tied us up in the Middle East at an incredible price. We've spent more than $5 trillion and thousands of American soldiers have died securing Middle East oil. — T. Boone Pickens

Rather, risk is a perception in each investor's mind that results from analysis of the probability and amount of potential loss from an investment. If an exploratory oil well proves to be a dry hole, it is called risky. If a bond defaults or a stock plunges in price, they are called risky. But if the well is a gusher, the bond matures on schedule, and the stock rallies strongly, can we say they weren't risky when the investment after it is concluded than was known when it was made. — Seth Klarman

I am not going to make decisions based on barricades and blockades, nor am I going to make decisions based on the short-term volatility of the oil price. — Gordon Brown

We're hopeful it won't climb much more than that (10 percent). The reality is we're all looking at the price per gallon of gasoline and heating oil, and even cord wood, and we're seeing prices that are volatile and I don't think anybody can accurately predict what we'll be paying for these commodities in two weeks, let alone two months. — Martin Murray

It was not our war, but it would be our disgrace, our shame. The West was filling to declare a war over the price of oil, but when it came to the wholesale slaughter of human beings we folded our hands across our chests and tapped our heels, with great anticipation that Sunday's sporting events would be wonderfully entertaining — Bill Carter

My wife will automatically quote and compare the price of diesel at every petrol station we drive by, like she's got oil-based Tourette's. — Ian Watson

If the United States was mad enough to attack Iran or aggress Venezuela again the price of a barrel of oil could reach $150 or even $200. — Hugo Chavez

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime. — Matt Ridley

The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax [CIA code for the August 1953 coup] taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship. — Stephen Kinzer

Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth? — Alex Berenson

Extreme weather like the droughts in Russia, China and Brazil and the flooding in Pakistan and Australia [in 2010] have contributed to a level of food price volatility we haven't seen since the oil crisisof 40 years ago. Unfortunately, this could be just a taste of things to come because in the next few decades the build-up of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere could greatly increase the risk of droughts, flooding, pest infestation and water scarcity for agriculture systems already under tremendous stress. — John Beddington

Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food. — Jeremy Grantham

We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%. — Warren Buffett

We'd be better off if the whole purpose of the adventure in Iraq was, say, to protect Israel or to protect the flow of oil to America and keep it at a reasonable price and try to get some more control. If it was about oil, going into Iraq, I guess, could have made sense. But at a certain point, when the insurgency began and we were in real trouble, there would have been some awareness that we were going to jeopardize the oil. — Seymour Hersh

The price of crude oil accounts for 55 percent of the price of a gallon of gasoline, driven by global supply and demand. The United States depends on foreign sources of oil for 62 percent of our nation's supply. By 2010, this is projected to jump to 75 percent. — Gary Miller

Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water
of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don't care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food. — Michael Pollan

When the Europeans conquered America, they opened gold and silver mines and established sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations. These mines and plantations became the mainstay of American production and export. The sugar plantations were particularly important. In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eighteen pounds in the early nineteenth century. — Yuval Noah Harari

Unlike fuel-economy standards, the most common method of reducing demand for oil over the past thirty years, a gas tax doesn't tell people what kind of car to drive. It simply raises the price of gasoline and lets people adjust their behavior accordingly. — James Surowiecki

I think Virgin Blue is still a very promising and exciting business.
Now, I know that's not a view that's widely held in the market but I think the market is simply throwing it into the too-hard basket at the present time because of the oil price events.
But we think it is still a very exciting business. — Chris Corrigan

OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn't anymore. — Ben H. Winters

One of the industries we follow very closely is the trucking industry. They would love if today there was an option for them to run their fleets on natural gas, because of the price disparity between oil and refined diesel - which they almost exclusively run on now - and natural gas. — Warren Stephens

I don't see why OPEC countries should continue to cut production just to keep the price of oil high. This will not affect the industrial countries alone, it will also hit poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Who will look after them? — Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani

If you want your energy bills to go up, you should support an ever greater dependence on foreign oil, because the rate of new discoveries is declining as demand in China and India is growing, and the price of oil and thus the price of coal will go sky high. — Al Gore

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

The International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world's debt enforcers - "You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs." I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the '70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called "go-go banking"); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early '80s; how, during the '80s and '90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on — David Graeber

Now it will take a long time to scale biofuels, but I'm the only one in the world forecasting oil dropping in price to $35 a barrel by 2030. I'll put it on the record: Oil will not be able to compete with cellulosic biofuels. If you do it from food, the food will get so expensive you can't make fuel out of it. — Vinod Khosla

As technology keeps improving, the price of oil keeps rising, and the ice keeps melting, Arctic energy is bound to be an increasingly bigger part of the global mix. — Alex Shoumatoff

The price of oil is rising because of all the unrest in the Middle East. And the unrest in Wisconsin is causing the price of cheese to go through the roof. — Jay Leno

I don't think for a minute we went to Iraq for oil. It just so happened that it had oil. But I think we'll come out of the Iraqi situation with a call on their oil at market price. — T. Boone Pickens

About 75% of the price of gas is really dictated by crude oil. At the heart of the issue is increasing demand over a period of many years around the world. World crude oil consumption now is close to 90 million barrels a day. Most of the growth in demand is coming from China and the developing world. — John S. Watson

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand. — Steven D. Levitt

So, I think even in Saudi Arabia there is movement. And we have to remember that over the years they've stabilized the oil price and that is tremendously important for the economies of the world. I think we have no choice but to work with the government of Saudi Arabia. — Frank Carlucci

There's a lot of money to be made by strip-mining and drilling the dirtiest oil on the planet. But why should the rest of us pay the price? — Robert Redford

We're in a world of triple-digit oil prices for the foreseeable future, — Jeff Rubin

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

You can imagine these radicals getting a hold of a country where they're able to pull oil off the market to run the price of oil up to extract concession. — George W. Bush

Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion. — Barbara Castle

As long as the United States - and the world - gets its oil from the Middle East, we will be drawn into the endless crises that seem endemic to the region. American energy independence would not only liberate us, it would also drive down the worldwide price of oil. — Kathleen Troia McFarland

Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds - eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price — Michael Weiss

We need a reasonable price where producers will not start nagging. At a reasonable price, we can invest to produce more oil. — Abdallah Salem El-Badri

In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations. — Jeff Goodell

I do believe that oil production globally has peaked at 85 million barrels. And I've been very vocal about it. And what happens? The demand continues to rise. The only way you can possibly kill demand is with price. So the price of oil, gasoline, has to go up to kill the demand. Otherwise, keep the price down, the demand rises. — T. Boone Pickens

The various torments of life worked in shifts so that one was always on duty. Thus was human misery extracted day and night like water and oil are pulled from the earth. Thus was the toll inflicted, the price one paid for being unwittingly born. — Hugh Howey

We've got the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble when it comes to crime in this country. The FBI says burglary and robbery cost U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion annually. Securities fraud alone costs four times that. And securities fraud is nothing to the cost of oil spills, price-fixing, and dangerous or defective products. Fraud by health-care corporations alone costs us between $100 billion and $400 billion a year. No three-strikes-and-you're-out for these guys. Remember the S&L scandal? $500 billion. — Molly Ivins

A small group of people, they raise the price of oil and the whole world will suffer from this. — Ahmed Zaki Yamani

Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for. — Brian Reade