Trade Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her Colonial trade against foreign competitors.

George V of the United Kingdom

We seem to be unable to allow ourselves the dignity of engaging in this sort of straightforward reconsideration of our acts. After all, questioning is the great strength of democracy; the ability to doubt without losing face. Instead we charge on, chanting 'Free Trade — Prosperity', the way in 1212 on the Children's Crusade they must have chanted 'Jesus and Jerusalem!' Most were snatched up before they could reach the coast and sold into slavery or sent across the Mediterranean, again to be slaves.

John Ralston Saul

[The] most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms... is that "the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds."

The money received for sales has no other significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes of selling and of buying are complementary.

It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country—and especially the rights of trade unionists—if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.

Business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.

Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world's people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.

Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.

William Winwood Reade

Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.

Used with caution, such formulae really are very useful indeed, and indeed they form the professional stock-in-trade of most engineering designers and draughtsmen. There is not the slightest need to be ashamed of using them; in fact we all do. But they must be used with caution.

They'd poisoned me, dammit. Probably to trade my dead body to the barbarians for Wulfgar's safe return. Or maybe just for the fun of it.

Vivian Vande Velde

What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings. What a decline from this world of irony and reason and truthfulness down to Plato's kingdom of the sage whose magical powers raise him high above ordinary men; although not quite high enough to forgo the use of lies, or to neglect the sorry trade of every shaman — the selling of spells, of breeding spells, in exchange for power over his fellow-men.

Twelve years ago I made a mock
Of filthy trades and traffics;
I considered what they meant by stock;
I wrote delightful sapphics;
I knew the streets of Rome and Troy,
I supped with fates and Fairies--
Twelve years ago I was a boy,
A happy boy at Drury's.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.

Clarence Darrow

Since the discovery of oxygen the civilised world has undergone a revolution in manners and customs. The knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere, of the solid crust of the earth, of water, and of their influence upon the life of plants and animals, was linked to that discovery. The successful pursuit of innumerable trades and manufactures, the profitable separation of metals from their ores, also stand in the closest connection therewith.

Justus von Liebig

O Carpenter of Nazareth,
Whose mother was a village maid,
Shall we, Thy children, blow our breath
In scorn on any humble trade?
Have pity on our foolishness
And give us eyes, that we may see
Beneath the shopman's clumsy dress
The splendor of humanity!

As a matter of fact I trade in accordance to my means and always leave myself an ample margin of safety.

We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind. A man will boast to one person of an action — say some sharp transaction in trade - which he would be ashamed to own to another.

He [Tolstoy] seems to have felt somehow that social evolution was standing in his way. He did not like the division of labor. He hated all forms of commerce and trade. The State was an abomination in his eyes. He wanted it abolished and with it, indeed, all of modern society based upon machine industry. With Rousseau, he would go back to the primitive state.

Robert Hunter (author)

All trades did shew their skill in this, Each wise an Engineer: The Mairess took the tool in hand, The maids the stones did bear.

Alexander Brome

I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.

Stephen Jay Gould

Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.

Irish poets, earn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.

William Butler Yeats