Quotes About Profit

The only difference between a prayer and a curse is the one who stands to profit.

[A]ll churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are simply human inventions. They use fear to enslave us. They are a monopoly for power and profit.

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.

The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life.

People are motivated by the desires for privilege, for power, for profit. Those are not shocking revelations. Anyone who's had any experience in life knows these things.

Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.

Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind. - Epicurus

What farmers could profitably raise at any given location would depend on two key variables: how much people in the city were willing to pay for different crops, and how much it cost to transport those crops to market.

Not all good works can turn a profit, but profits can be directed toward good. As Warren Buffett explains, "I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.

India's transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

the devil is the merchant, and the sinner but the broker to trade for him, who at last puts all his gains into the devil's purse. Time,

La rentabilidad elevada en la inversión no puede obtenerse sin asumir un riesgo sustancial. Las inversiones seguras producen escasos beneficios.

I made a rule that I'd buy each stock exactly at the pivot buy point and have the discipline not to pyramid or add to my position at more than 5% past that point. Then I'd sell each stock when it was up 20%, while it was still advancing.

People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.

Petrarch warned that "what you won, a thousand will wrest from you here and there; what you lose, no one will give back to you." Even when a winner, he reasoned, the gambler did not truly profit.

Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange.

They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed. Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was validated and unlimited profit was considered a perfectly viable end in itself, this political, magical element became a genuine problem, because it meant that even those actors—the brokers, stock-jobbers, traders—who effectively made the system run had no convincing loyalty to anything, even to the system itself.

Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.

Capital, then, is not simply money. It is not even just wealth that can be turned into money. But neither is it just the use of political power to help one use one's money to make more money.

Even, he argued, if we are all rational enough to understand that it's in our long-term interest to live in peace and security, our short-term interests are often such that killing and plundering are the most obviously profitable courses to take, and all it takes is a few to cast aside their scruples to create utter insecurity and chaos.

But this has less to do with the nature of seed cultivation itself than with imperial and commercial expansion: seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army and are driven by the need endlessly to expand their enterprises to maintain profits.

As a general principle, when an enemy's army comes, it seeks some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death instead, they will consider running away the most profitable thing to do. When all one's enemies consider running to be the most profitable thing to do, no blades will cross. This is the most essential point in military matters.57

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.

treating financial success as the goal rather than as a by-product of a well-run firm