Quotes About Commerce

The invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago triggered a revolution in human living that would ultimately lead to cities, commerce, and money—and a dramatic expansion in gambling.

Muslim ethicists did often enjoin merchants to drive a hard bargain with the rich so they could charge less, or pay more, when dealing with the less fortunate.88

Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade.

This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.

California today is responsible for more than 40 percent of the nation's seagoing trade. That's why you can't talk about California without talking about its ports, as we will.

Avarice, the spur of industry, is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small, that it scarcely admits of calculation. Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable.

Commerce, . . . in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable.

Cedeo, a plumbing-supply store.

In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

Stamps God's own name upon a lie just made, To turn a penny in the way of trade.

God is making commerce His missionary.

Mr. Dingell is just plain Mr. Dingell. And when he gets to be chairman of the Commerce Committee, he doesn't let it go to his head. However, he thinks he would be a very, very good chairman.

Selling through the internet seems to be a very good idea. There are a million areas that we can go to.

Gratitude is like the good faith of traders: it maintains commerce, and we often pay, not because it is just to discharge our debts, but that we may more readily find people to trust us.

Our bilateral relations are very good, they're very close. In the areas of business, of the economy, the United States of America last year were our most important trading partner.

What, eBay isn't good enough for us?

Good things soon find a purchaser.

Trade can really be good for American workers and American businesses.

Less government in business and more business in government.

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

The business of government is to keep the government out of business - that is, unless business needs government aid.