Commodity Quotes - Page 7

• Freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away. Individual freedom demands individual responsibility.

  Lyn Nofziger

  Responsibility, Government, Demand

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• When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time.

  Susan Orlean

  Distance, Rain, Kids

  "Hello, It’s Me" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. May 12, 2010.

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• If I'm a commodity, it wouldn't be a wise idea to buy stock in me - although, in the long run, maybe I'm a slow growth investment.

  Tim Robbins

  Wise, Running, Ideas

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• Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.

  Sharon Salzberg

  Opposites, Despair, Ongoing

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• 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

  Mean, Use, Movement

  "The Limits To Capital". Book by David Harvey, 1982.

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• 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

  Children, Belief, Talent

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• When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

  Michael Pollan

  Eye, Cooking, Alive

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• A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

  John Dos Passos

  Ice Cream, People, Intellectual

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

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• The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.

  Terry Pratchett

  Cutting, Space, Woven

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• 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 August von Hayek

  Country, Powerful, Choices

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• In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Running, Father, Water

  Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.290, A&C Black

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• The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

  Guy Debord

  Loss, Reality, Quality

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• 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

  Mean, Eye, Want

  William Shakespeare (2010). “King Lear”, p.111, Broadview Press

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• The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.

  Ivan Illich

  Sacrifice, Medicine, Toil

  Ivan Illich (1982). “Medical nemesis: the expropriation of health”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• That which man dreams of and to Which he aspires, unless fulfilled in his own lifetime, can produce no actual satisfaction to him. It will be self deceiving and a waste of time to advocate dialogue with those who are not ready to listen, because it is obvious that the freedom of millions is not a commodity subject to bargaining. It is better to die free than to live as slaves.

  Haile Selassie

  Dream, Men, Self

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• Money is different from all other commodities: other things being equal, more shoes, or more discoveries of oil or copper benefit society, since they help alleviate natural scarcity. But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed. Since the only use of money is for exchange and reckoning, more dollars or pounds or marks in circulation cannot confer a social benefit: they will simply dilute the exchange value of every existing dollar or pound or mark.

  Murray Rothbard

  Money, Oil, Discovery

  "Making Economic Sense". Book by Murray Rothbard (p. 274), 1995.

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• 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

  Exercise, Civilization, People

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

  Alexander Hamilton

  Agriculture, Wealth, Prosperity

  Alexander Hamilton (1851). “The works of Alexander Hamilton: comprising his correspondence, and his political and official writings, exclusive of the federalist, civil and military”, p.237

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• We live in a culture where everything is designed for our comfort or entertainment but nothing satisfies. At our core, we remain insatiable, constantly on the prowl for new commodities and pleasant sensations to fill the void.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Comfort, Culture, Void

  Daniel Pinchbeck (2002). “Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism”, p.128, Three Rivers Press

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• Who taught me that animals were put on this Earth for food? Who taught me to disrespect animals and view them as mere commodities? Who stole my compassion, my empathy and my conscience? Who lied to me? Who instilled this vicious mindset of human-to-animal exploitation as standard operating procedure?

  Gary Yourofsky

  Animal, Compassion, Views

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• Manufacture, don't just trade. There is money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive. To achieve a big breakthrough, I had to start manufacturing the same product I was trading on; which is commodities.

  Aliko Dangote

  Achieve, Bigs, Breakthrough

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• I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world.

  Angela Davis

  Thinking, Engagement, World

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• The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

  Angela Davis

  Country, Thinking, Mind

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• By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

  Ron Chernow

  People, Appreciate, House

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• Justice is a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Justice, Rewards, Citizens

  Ambrose Bierce (2006). “Terror by Night: Classic Ghost and Horror Stories”, p.9, Wordsworth Editions

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