Alfred Marshall quotes

Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money. (Alfred Marshall)
In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Consumption may be regarded as negative production. View quote
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. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth. View quote
Alfred Marshall
All wealth consists of desirable things; that is, things which satisfy human wants directly or indirectly: but not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth. View quote
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. View quote
Alfred Marshall
The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings. View quote
Alfred Marshall
All labour is directed towards producing some effect. View quote
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. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree. (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. View quote
Alfred Marshall
The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Knowledge is our most powerful engine of production. View quote
Alfred Marshall
The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Every short statement about economics is misleading (with the possible exception of my present one). View quote
Alfred Marshall
The love for money is only one among many. View quote
Alfred Marshall
It is common to distinguish necessaries, comforts, and luxuries; the first class including all things required to meet wants which must be satisfied, while the latter consist of things that meet wants of a less urgent character. View quote
Alfred Marshall
The commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Alfred Marshall
There has always been a temptation to classify economic goods in clearly defined groups, about which a number of short and sharp propositions could be made, to gratify at once the student's desire for logical precision, and the popular liking for dogmas that have the air of being profound and are yet easily handled. But great mischief seems to have been done by yielding to this temptation, and drawing broad artificial lines of division where Nature has made none. The more simple and absolute an economic doctrine is, the greater will be the confusion which it brings into attempts to apply economic doctrines to practice, if the dividing lines to which it refers cannot be found in real life. There is not in real life a clear line of division between things that are and are not Capital, or that are and are not Necessaries, or again between labour that is and is not Productive. View quote
Alfred Marshall
I am myself an uncompromising anti-Jingoe, a peace-at-almost-any-price man. Chamberlain is the only Unionist public man whom I have ever thoroughly distrusted. Excepting Napoleon, I believe that England's true greatness has had no such dangerous enemy since Lord North. When a radical, he delighted to dish his colleagues even more than to flout his opponents. He is now engaged in dishing his new colleagues and flouting his old friends. View quote
Alfred Marshall
Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing. View quote
Alfred Marshall