Market Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The pulpit only "teaches" to be honest; the market-place "trains" to overreaching and fraud; and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a tract, but He went about doing good.

The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

John Maynard Keynes

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

Vladimir Nabokov

The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

Mr. Market does not always price stocks the way an appraiser or a private buyer would value a business. Instead, when stocks are going up, he happily pays more than their objective value; and, when they are going down, he is desperate to dump them for less than their true worth.

Benjamin Graham

When the Statist makes a wrong decision, its impact is far-reaching, for he uses the power of government to impose his decision on as many individuals and businesses as possible, which distorts the free market itself.

The investor should be aware that even though safety of its principal and interest may be unquestioned, a long term bond could vary widely in market price in response to changes in interest rates.

Benjamin Graham

The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

Joseph Stiglitz

To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

The sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market to argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.

But whatever the consensus on the EMH, I know of no serious academic, professional money manager, trained security analyst, or intelligent individual investor who would disagree with the thrust of EMH: The stock market itself is a demanding taskmaster. It sets a high hurdle that few investors can leap.

The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?

Fernand Braudel

Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.

Benjamin Graham

Before you can have a share of market, you must have a share of mind.

Play with a foole at home, and he will play with you in the market.

Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.

Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.

Benjamin Graham

The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.

Ludwig von Mises

A fine morning's killing, ay! All their necks wrung - all dead birds! Once they could fly - fly and swim! Fly and swim! All dead now - and sold cheap in the open market!

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Get your idea out there as fast as possible even if it's not quite ready by setting must-hit deadlines. Let the market tell you if you have a winner or not. If not – move on and fail forward fast! If it's got potential – then you can make it better.

Our belief in salvation through the market is very much in the Utopian tradition. The economists and managers are the servants of God. Like the medieval scholastics, their only job is to uncover the divine plan. They could never create or stop it. At most they might aspire to small alterations.

John Ralston Saul

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

John Kenneth Galbraith