Alfred Marshall Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

Alfred Marshall
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

Alfred Marshall
In the absence of any short term in common use to represent all desirable things, or things that satisfy human wants, we may use the term Goods for that purpose.

Alfred Marshall
But if inventions have increased man's power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities.

Alfred Marshall
Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.

Alfred Marshall
Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.

Alfred Marshall
Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

Alfred Marshall
Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree.

Alfred Marshall
Statistics are the straw out of which I, like every other economist, have to make the bricks.

Alfred Marshall
The commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm.

Alfred Marshall
Facts by themselves are silent. Observation discovers nothing directly of the actions of causes, but only of sequences in time.

Alfred Marshall
In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

Alfred Marshall
Greedy then as the economist must be for facts, he must not be content with mere facts. Boundless as must be his gratitude to the great thinkers of the historic school, he must be suspicious of any direct light that the past is said to throw on the problems of the present.

Alfred Marshall
Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.

Alfred Marshall
Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.

Alfred Marshall
Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

Alfred Marshall
The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves.

Alfred Marshall
Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.

Alfred Marshall
Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

Alfred Marshall
And very often the influence exerted on a person's character by the amount of his income is hardly less, if it is less, than that exerted by the way in which it is earned.

Alfred Marshall
We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production.

Alfred Marshall
Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.

Alfred Marshall
The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes.

Alfred Marshall
The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings

Alfred Marshall