Commodities Quotes

It seems that no one wants to be "ideological" anymore, and that includes being straight edge. On the one hand, you can see it as today's kids just being against "rules" of any kind, a sort of postmodernist end of ideology. On the other hand, you can see it as kids shying away from anything serious; from anything that demands deeper involvement. The result is that radical cultures are turned into commodities. ~ Jonathan Pollack

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Prudence is what makes someone a great commodities trader - the capacity to face reality squarely in the eye without allowing emotion or ego to get in the way. It's what is needed by every quarterback or battlefield general. ~ John Ortberg

The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts. ~ Eric Schlosser

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. ~ Karl Marx

Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth. ~ Karl Marx

Currencies are things that you use to pay for other things; commodities are things that you buy. If art is going to be one or the other, it's going to be a commodity, not a currency. ~ Felix Salmon

Medicines are unusual commodities. Important drugs can save the lives and protect the health of millions. Their consumption can bring huge benefits, by helping patients to avoid infection and preventing serious damage to the economies of families, nations and even humanity at large. ~ Thomas Pogge

But a rise in the wages of labour would not equally affect commodities produced with machinery quickly consumed, and commodities produced with machinery slowly consumed. ~ David Ricardo

The price of a commodity will never go to zero. When you invest in commodities futures, you're not buying a piece of paper that says you own an intangible piece of company that can go bankrupt. ~ Jim Rogers

But she would never have set eyes on him or given him the time of day if he hadn't become filthy rich. His money had indeed bought him love. Given what he had seen of the world, the exchange of love for money seemed to be one of the commodities that never wavered - it was as dependable an investment as electricity. ~ Heather O'Neill

These are the lords
That have bought titles: men may merchandise
Wares, ay and traffic in all commodities
From sea to sea, and from shore to shore:
But in my thought, of all things that are sold,
'Tis pity honor should be bought for gold:
It cuts off all desert. ~ Eliza Haywood

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. ~ John Lukacs

Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely, in its sheer worldly existence, every thing also transcends the sphere of pure instrumentality once it is completed. ~ Hannah Arendt

Although the rudiments of snobbery are there, its finer developments are basically alien to the Australian soul - that is, if Australians have a soul; many people believe that they are too matter-of-fact and down-to-earth to have such fancy commodities. ~ George Mikes

A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of those liberties is based are equally distributed to all. ~ Ivan Illich

I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March. ~ Angela Davis

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. ~ Fred Brooks

Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I've made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action. ~ Jim Rogers

Manufacture, don't just trade. There is money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive. To achieve a big breakthrough, I had to start manufacturing the same product I was trading on; which is commodities. ~ Aliko Dangote

The counsel to have a year's supply of basic food, clothing, and commodities was given fifty years ago and has been repeated many times since. Every father and mother are the family's store keepers. They should store whatever their own family would like to have in the case of an emergency ... store a year's supply ... that might keep us form starving in case of emergency. ~ James E. Faust

I have no way and therefore want no eyes
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen
our means secure us, and our mere defects
prove our commodities. ~ William Shakespeare

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. ~ Edward R. Murrow

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money. ~ Karl Marx

But here again it must be observed that this is a matter of a variation brought about through dynamic agencies. The static state, for which the contention attributed to the adherents of the mechanical version of the Quantity Theory would be valid, is disturbed by the fact that the exchange-ratios between individual commodities are necessarily modified. Under certain conditions, the technique of the market may have the effect of extending this modification to the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods also. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The disorganisers are those who want to level everything: property, comforts, the price of commodities, the various services rendered to the State ... who want the workmen in the camp to receive the salary of the legislator ... who want to level even talents, knowledge, the virtues, because they themselves have none of these things. ~ Jacques Pierre Brissot

We are not members, . . . we are commodities. . . . When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we're thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters. ~ Miriam Toews

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed. ~ Karl Marx

You might think of Bitcoin and blockchain as two halves of a whole, but in reality, they are very distinct commodities. ~ Olawale Daniel

So tell me, Ray, what are the percentages you would put in stocks? What percentage in gold? and so on."...
"First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket)...
"Then you need long-term government bonds. Fifteen percent in intermediate term [seven- to ten-year Treasuries] and forty percent in long-term bonds [20- to 25-year Treasuries]."...
He rounded out the portfolio with 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities...
Lastly, the portfolio must be rebalanced. Meaning, when one segment does well, you must sell a portion and reallocate back to the original allocation. This should be done at least annually, and, if done properly, can actually increase tax efficiency. p390 ~ Tony Robbins

Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The exchangeable value of all commodities, rises as the difficulties of their production increase. ~ David Ricardo

If animals are just commodities, then we are just consumers, with no greater good than material pleasure and no higher law than appetite. ~ Matthew Scully

I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards:

First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence - that they do not have an interest in their lives - involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence - every sentient being values her or his life - and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an "eternal present" - and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future - they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist.

Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of ~ Gary L. Francione

Men live by rules they've made for themselves. And among those rules is one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman's own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored. ~ Natsuo Kirino

When the commodities go up and the cost of transportation is going up, and the value of the dollar is going down, it's all going to translate to an 8 to 10 percent rise in food prices. ~ John Catsimatidis

For one cause or another, it has become necessary to impose restrictions upon the use of many commodities, including not a few of the necessities of life. ~ William Lyon Mackenzie King

The Nordic countries are leading the way on women's equality, recognizing women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale. ~ Johanna Siguroardottir

All those commodities are going to have to rise in value as we are in short supply and we are printing too much money. ~ Peter Schiff

Sisterhood is powerful. Woman can support each other as women, in their pursuit for enlightenment or anything else, without fear. But as long as she's still in the commodities exchange market, buying and selling, she must fear the competition. ~ Frederick Lenz

Credit expansion results in the recurrence of economic crisis and periods of depression. Inflation makes the prices of all commodities and services soar. The attempts to enforce wage rates higher than those the unhampered market would have determined produce mass unemployment prolonged year after year. Price ceilings result in a drop in the supply of commodities affected. The economists have proved these theorems in an irrefutable way. No ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as 'property' were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models ... have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, ... the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities. ~ John Carroll

This involves a lengthy restatement, in plain language, of the point made in more Hegelian terms in the Grundrisse. The dual nature of commodities, which can be seen as use-values or exchange-values, affects labour too. What is special about labour, though, is that it is the measure of exchange-value. ~ Anonymous

There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket - but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. ~ Joseph Conrad

Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Scarlet, when aware that she was consciously asking her friend for advice and support, felt guilty, for she had come to believe that advice and support were commodities for which you paid professionals, rather as you paid prostitutes for love and bought your vegetables instead of growing them yourself. ~ Alice Thomas Ellis

Now, what produces a want of demand? A refusal to take from other countries the commodities which they produce. ~ Joseph Hume

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on "industrious Planters" that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was "corrupt," and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite ~ Nancy Isenberg

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents. ~ Ivan Illich

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew
not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew ... What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man
and turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. ~ Karl Marx

They founded a society based not upon currency and commodities but on the elementary notion that if you failed to raise enough to eat, you would go hungry. ~ Shirley Abbott

What is the free market? Well, the free market, [we're told] is really a terrible, inhuman kind of arrangement, because it treats people like commodities. But how does the government treat people? Like garbage-worse than garbage. Not like commodities, but like nothing. We libertarians understand that we are not humane, we are not compassionate. It's the leftists and the liberals, they're the ones who are human and compassionate, but you'd better not get in their way. ~ Ralph Raico

The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that. ~ Angela Davis

Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable ... it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked. ~ Friedrich Hayek

The course of time, all of Apple's competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone. ~ Simon Sinek

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. ~ Herbert Marcuse

John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it. ~ Lierre Keith

By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world's land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia's mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I don't think you should invest in commodities. Eddie Murphy made it seem risky in Trading Places. ~ Eugene Mirman

Capitalism has turned human beings into commodities. To the owner of a restaurant: the cook and a bag of potatoes are equally important. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

My first proper job was as a commodities broker. I went off to work every morning in an '80s power suit. I couldn't afford a good one, so I'd buy nice buttons instead and make it look better than it actually was. ~ Trinny Woodall

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. ~ Nick Harkaway

The opinions that the price of commodities depends solely on the proportion of supply and demand, or demand to supply, has become almost an axiom in political economy, and has been the source of much error in that science. ~ David Ricardo

Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight ... Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God's absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering. ~ Andrew Linzey

When we crumble under the exorbitant weight of conspicuous commodities and the material pressure in a universe of illusion, life may become disheveled and devastated, while our mind has been dumbed down and our willpower crippled. ( "Buying now. Dying later " ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Social Ecology:
The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man ... But it was not until organic community relation ... dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. ... The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital. ~ Murray Bookchin

Here Marx simply assumes that proletarianization has already occurred and that a functioning labor market already exists. But he does, however, want to make "one thing" clear: Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production. ~ David Harvey

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating. ~ Adam Smith

Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration. Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords. All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks.

Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds.

My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the country where they were in short supply. ~ Jung Chang

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

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. ~ Gyorgy Lukacs

Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency ... and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating. ~ Alan Greenspan

No extension of foreign trade will immediately increase the amount of value in a country, although it will very powerfully contribute to increase the mass of commodities and therefore the sum of enjoyments. ~ David Ricardo

To alter the money value of commodities, by altering the value of money, and yet to raise the same money amount by taxes, is then undoubtedly to increase the burthens of society. ~ David Ricardo

What is most disturbing today is that we use rational methods to cultivate the tastes and values of the young in all kinds of educational, religious, and cultural institutions that are predicated on corporate practices and goals. Everything we do to, with, and for our children is influenced by capitalist market conditions and the hegemonic interests of ruling corporate elites. In simple terms, we calculate what is best for our children by regarding them as investments and turning them into commodities. ~ Jack Zipes

Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them. ~ David Ricardo

It is therefore utterly false to say that Marx revokes the law of value as far as individual commodities are concerned, and maintains it in force solely for the aggregate of these commodities. ~ Rudolf Hiferding

The production of fuel from basic food commodities is, in fact, unjustifiable. ~ Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system? ~ Charles Eisenstein

Silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities. ~ Alan Bradley

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings. ~ Erich Fromm

As we are brought into God's extraordinary kingdom through ordinary means, we are remade, no longer fashioned as competitors for commodities in a world of scarce resources, but as co-sharers with Christ in the circulation of gifts that flows outward from its source without running out. ~ Michael Horton

Neither machines, nor the commodities made by them, rise in real value, but all commodities made by machines fall, and fall in proportion to their durability. ~ David Ricardo

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ~ Karl Marx

The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Africa is where commodities are found, so it is vital that Glencore and other miners are there to develop those resources, helping Africa itself to grow at the same time. ~ Ivan Glasenberg

The exchangeability that is expressed in money must inevitably have repercussions upon the quality of commodities themselves, or must interact
with it. The disparagement of the interest in the individuality of a
commodity leads to a disparagement of
individuality itself. If the two sides
to a commodity are its quality and it
s price, then it seems logically
impossible for the interest to be focused on only one of these sides: for
cheapness is an empty word if it does not imply a low price for a relative
good quality, and good quality is
an economic attraction only for a
correspondingly fair price. And yet this conceptual impossibility is psychologically real and effective.
The interest in the one side can be so
great that its logically necessary counterpart completely disappears. The
typical instance of one of these case
s is the 'fifty cents bazaar'. The
principle of valuation in the mode
rn money economy finds its clearest
expression here. It is not the commodity
that is the centre of interest here
but the price - a principle that in former times not only would have appeared shameless but would have been
absolutely impossible. It has been
rightly pointed out that the medieval town, despite all the progress it
embodied, still lacked the extensive
capital economy, and that this was the
reason for seeking the ideal of the economy not so much in the expansio ~ Georg Simmel

While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes. ~ Elliott Abrams

The essence of air transport is speed, and speed is unfortunately one of the most expensive commodities in the world, principally because of the disproportionate amount of the power required to achieve high speed and to lift loads thousands of feet into the air. This is strikingly illustrated by the fact that while an average cargo ship, freight train and transport aeroplane are each equipped with engines totalling about 2,500 H.P., the ship can carry a load of about 7,000 tons, the train 800 tons and the plane only two and a half tons. ~ J.R.D. Tata

Let's share our abundance and make our country stronger. We can encourage programs that collect and distribute excess prepared food to local organizations that are helping the hungry in our own communities. We can also support programs that supply commodities to food banks. It's all part of committing our country's wealth and resources to end childhood hunger. ~ John Travolta

The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder. ~ Arundhati Roy

I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange. ~ Marina Warner

It were good to know how much hay an acre of every sort will bear; how many cattle the same weight of each sort of hay will feed and fatten; what quantity of grain and other commodities the same acre will bear in one, three or seven years; unto what use each soil is proper; all which particulars I call intrinsic value, for there is also another value merely accidental or extrinsic. ~ William Petty

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor. ~ Margaret Chan

Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving, and receiving. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators. ~ Sol LeWitt

Some of these biggest financial institutions are out there trading in commodities. They're buying oil tankers. This is not a financial system that has calmed down and is there to serve the American people. ~ Elizabeth Warren

I have come to the conclusion that silence and time are the most precious commodities. ~ Eloisa James

Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity. ~ Raymond Williams

Paper money in time of war, the new notes will first go into the pockets of the war contractors. 'As a result, these persons' demands for certain articles will increase and so also the price and the sale of these articles, but especially in so far as they are luxury articles. Thus the position of the producers of these articles will be improved, their demand for other commodities will also increase, and thus the increase of prices and sales will go on, distributing itself over a constantly augmented number of articles, until at last it has reached them all. ~ Ludwig Von Mises