Commodity Quotes - Page 18

• Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

  Joan Robinson

  Quality, Circularity, Want

  Joan Robinson (1962). “Economic philosophy”, p.47, Transaction Publishers

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• With the growth of the world population, the global climate change and the need for a greater healthy environment, access to water resources has become a crucial condition for the realization of an equitable international order, where the needs of the peoples are effectively addressed. In this regard, the need for international cooperation, including in joint effort with relevant non-state actors, is paramount to ensure water is made available to all without discrimination. Water is a human right, an enabling right, not a mere commodity.

  Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

  Order, Water, Effort

  Statement by Alfred de Zayas on World Water Day, March 22, 2013.

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• But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking.

  Margery Sharp

  Truth, Way, Dangerous

  Margery Sharp (2016). “Britannia Mews: A Novel”, p.81, Open Road Media

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• To me, money is a commodity that a person must have to function, not a goal in itself.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Goal, Function, Persons

  Buzz Aldrin, Ken Abraham (2009). “Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon”, p.146, Crown Archetype

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• There is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.

  Bruce LaBruce

  Gay, Order, Lifestyle Choices

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• It seems hardly fair to quarrel with a place because its staple commodity is not pretty, but I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.

  Frances Trollope

  Should Have, Cities, People

  Frances Trollope (2015). “Domestic Manners of the Americans”, p.65, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• We do not claim that punning is legitimate wit. Wit consists in combination of ideas, punning in combination of words only. We wonder at the one, but we laugh at the drollery of the other - as the world goes a pun is regarded as an imponderable commodity, all know the rank it holds in the order of pure intellect.

  Harriet Hosmer

  Ideas, Order, Laughing

  Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1913). “Harriet Hosmer: letters and memories”

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• In the time of the sacred sites and the crashing of ecosystems and worlds, it may be worth not making a commodity out of all that is revered.

  Winona LaDuke

  Ecosystems, World, May

  Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stanley, David Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim (2013). “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”, p.97, The Golden Sufi Center

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• As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.

  Charles Dickens

  Character, Past, Men

  Charles Dickens (1867). “Charles Dickens's works. Charles Dickens ed. [18 vols. of a 21 vol. set. Wanting A child's history of England; Christmas stories; The mystery of Edwin Drood].”, p.25

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• There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Book, People, World

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• Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mean, Perception, Language

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.183, University of Toronto Press

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• Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Pain, Husband

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• 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

  Wine, Beer, Bread

  Desiderius Erasmus (1965). “The education of a Christian prince”, Hippocrene Books

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• ... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but itcan not do without that life.

  Emma Goldman

  Business, Sacrifice, Should

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.81, Library of Alexandria

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• Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.

  Raymond Williams

  Art, Independent, Kind

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• This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone tocount myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person who I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Money, Responsibility, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1937). “Essays, First and Second Series”, p.202, Jazzybee Verlag

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• A demand for commodities is not a demand for labor. The demand for labor is determined by the amount of capital directly devoted to the remuneration of labor: the demand for commodities simply determines in what direction labor shall be employed.

  Millicent Fawcett

  Demand, Determined, Economics

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• If a marriage is going to work well, it must be on a solid footing, namely money, and of that commodity it is the girl with the smallest dowry who, to my knowledge, consumes the most, to infuriate her husband. All the same, it is only fair that the marriage should pay for past pleasures, since it will scarcely procure any in the future.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Marriage, Girl, Money

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• The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Children, Environmental, Individual

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• 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

  Soul, Tariffs, Checks

  "Living Words". Book by Edwin Hubbel Chapin, 1869.

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• It is also painful to see that the struggle against hunger and malnutrition is hindered by market priorities, the primacy of profit, which have reduced foodstuffs to a commodity like any other, subject to speculation, also of a financial nature, The hungry remain, at the street corner, and ask to be recognized as citizens, to receive a healthy diet. We ask for dignity, not for charity.

  Pope Francis

  Nature, Struggle, Priorities

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• If you like what Wall Street did for the housing market, you'll love what Wall Street is doing for commodities. Goldman's ability to influence any portion of the price for a key component of the industrial economy is simply unacceptable.

  Carl Levin

  Love, Wall, Keys

  Carl Levin's opening statement before U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Wall Street Bank Involvement With Physical Commodities at Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., www.hsgac.senate.gov. November 20, 2014.

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• Money is not the only commodity that is fun to give. We can give time, we can give our expertise, we can give our love or simply give a smile. What does that cost? The point is, none of us can ever run out of something worthwhile to give.

  Steve Goodier

  Running, Fun, Giving

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• And the desire to own property, to take for ourselves things which in no way belong to us, does not stop short at the sun. The air is already bought and sold as a commodity, by health resorts. And what of water? Or waterpower? Why should the earth be parceled out into private hands? Is it any different from the sun? No; the earth belongs to the people who live on it. God intended it for them, but it has been taken over by private individuals. Privare means to steal. Thus private property is stolen property - property stolen from God and from humankind!

  Eberhard Arnold

  Taken, Mean, Air

  Eberhard Arnold, Johann Christoph Arnold (2000). “Eberhard Arnold: Writings Selected with an Introduction”, p.94, The Plough Publishing House

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• But it is important to realize we are all trapped in mental constructs, and so we separate ourselves from reality; the whole world loses its aliveness-or, rather, we lose our ability to sense that aliveness, the sacredness of nature. When we approach nature through the conceptualizing mind, we see a forest as a commodity, a concept. We no longer see it for what it truly is, but for what we want to use it as. It is reduced. This is how it becomes possible for humans to destroy the planet without realizing what they are doing.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Reality, Mind, Important

  "Beyond Happiness And Unhappiness". Interview with Steve Donoso, thesunmagazine.org. July 2002.

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