Market Quotes

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
― Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems

“The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”
― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

“You may collect a bagful seeds of poetry
my picking up these words in this market,
life may be climbing rungs of ladder
stepping on each sentence here,
but
words caught in the competition of
selling troubles and buying dreams
even ignore changing colours
climbing on their own faces.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“This market
surging with sound of stream
slogged by monsoon rain
paints its picture
with each stroke of speech.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.”
― Gustave de Molinari

“Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants.The market is fickle; the soul is eternal'.”
― Jeffrey Carver

“Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem—unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and ani­mals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, [classical] liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition

“A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends”
― Peter Bevelin, All I Want To Know Is Where I'm Going To Die So I'll Never Go There

“Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.

Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own.

But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state?

The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“While I slept you stood in the
colorful night market
with pyramids of bright
fruit piled high

Where those who loved you,
rushing back to their intimate stalls,
held out pears that had been
dreamed for you

And would the dream pear not
come gladly
once it knew this was you
wanting to take it in?

The dream pear chose reality,
wanting your mouth as I did -

Honestly, it was happy to be bitten.”
― Brenda Hillman

“Even the most beautifully written, perfectly edited and well-designed books will fail if people aren't made aware of them!" ––Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications, on the importance of public relations and marketing.”
― Linda F. Radke, The Economical Guide to Self-Publishing: How to Produce and Market Your Book on a Budget

“It wasn't science and technology that cause a slow progress,
but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“HENRI: Oh, but poetry and the stock market have a lot in common, you know.
SKIP: Poetry and the market!
HENRI: OH yes. They are both based on rules that the successful never obey.”
― Arthur Miller

“The social activity of
commodities on the market is to capitalist society what collective
intelligence is to a socialist society.”
― Rudolph Hiferding, Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development

“In fact, this can happen only when the conditions for commodity
production and exchange are equal for all members of society; that is to
say, when they are all independent owners of their means of production
who use these means to fabricate the product and exchange it on the
market. This is the most elementary relationship, and constitutes the
starting point for a theoretical analysis. Only on this basis can later
modifications be understood; but they must always satisfy the condition
that, whatever the nature of an individual exchange may be, the sum of
exchange acts must clear the market of the total product. Any
modification can be induced only by a change in the position of the
members of society within production. In fact, the modification must
take place in this manner because production and the producers can only
be integrated as a social unit through the operation of the exchange
process. Thus the expropriation of one section of society and the
monopolization of the means of production by another modify the exchange
process, because only there can the fact of social inequality appear.
However, since the exchange relationship is one of equality, social
inequality must assume the form of a parity of prices of production
rather than an equality of value. In other words, the inequality in the
expenditure of labour (which is a matter of indifference to capitalists
since it is the labour expenditure of others) is concealed behind an
equalization of the rate of profit. This kind of equality simply
underlines the fact that capital is the decisive factor in a capitalist
society. The individual act of exchange no longer has to satisfy the
requirement that units of labour in exchange shall be equal, and instead
the principle now prevails that equal profits shall accrue to equal
capitals. The equalization of labour is replaced by the equalization of
profit, and products are sold not at their values, but at their prices
of production.”
― Rudolph Hiferding, Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development

“If the audience is sleeping during the presentation, one of the following might be wrong; the message, messenger, or market”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“It looked like a market, but such a market as Marra had never seen. There were jeweled pavilions crowded next to mud huts and hide tents and things that looked like upside-down bird nests. The aisles between were crowded, but the people within them did not move like a crowd. They moved like dancers, some light, some heavy, some in circling solitary waltzes. They reminded Marra far more of the courtiers in the prince's palace than of the town on market day.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Nothing is too saturated, you just can't find your own hue.”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“As much as it celebrates regional produce, this book hopes to be a young Singaporean's love song to the markets. In the course of writing this book, the market's beauty has grown on me. When I fumble with coins in my purse, the vegetable uncle always tells me that I can pay the next time. I learn cooking tips and recipes not only from the vendors, but also from fellow patrons - shopping at the wet markets is an interactive, immersive experience. I do not think I will ever tire of walking through markets, admiring the way the produce spills over baskets and cartons, relishing the way everything feels so organic, so raw and so real.”
― Pamelia Chia, Wet Market to Table: A Modern Approach to Fruit and Vegetables

“Dear Daughter,
Nurture your talent. Sell it to the world. It is your market.”
― Gift Gugu Mona , Dear Daughter: Short and Sweet Messages for a Queen

“I pass trays of spun-sugar animals, little acorn cups filled with wine, enormous sculptures of horn, and a stall where a bent-backed woman takes a brush and draws charms on the soles of shoes. It takes some wandering, but I finally find a collection of sculpted leather masks. They are pinned to a wall and cunningly shaped like the faces of strange animals or laughing goblins or boorish mortals, painted gold and green and every other colour imaginable.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“As soon as we emerge from the tube and walk through the limestone archway on Borough High Street, we are bombarded by purveyors of everything from fresh vegetables and buttery pastries to goat's milk ice cream and soft, eggy strands of pasta. Hugh lets me wander up and down the aisles, and I stop to watch one vendor stir a three-foot-wide paella pan, offering up piping hot bowls of tender prawns and rice to a throng of hungry customers.”
― Dana Bate, Too Many Cooks

“the market is a machine, and these are just the noises that the gears make when they turn”
― Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“the market is a machine, and these are just the noises that the gears make when they turn (...) the market is a machine, if any man is so foolish as to stop the works from turning, he should not be surprised when he gets ground up in its gears”
― Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“Only producers constitute a market - only men who trade products and services for products and services. In the role of producers, they represent a market’s supply; in the role of consumers, they represent a market’s demand. The law of supply and demand has an implicit subclause: that it involves the same people in both capacities. When this subclause is forgotten, ignored or evaded - you get the economic situation of today.
The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“From the railroads to digital innovation, history proves this truth: innovation creates markets, and markets attract buyers and sellers.”
― Segun Alonge Jr

“At the heart of every great economy is the capacity to produce. A consuming nation will struggle to make progress.”
― Segun Alonge Jr

“The People's Republic of China thrives on a simple fact: production powers progress.”
― Segun Alonge Jr