Levaggi Mercantile Quotes

If some saw the Indians as living in prelapsarian innocence, there were others who judged them to be savage beasts, devils in the form of men. The discovery of cannibals in the Caribbean did nothing to assuage this opinion. The Spaniards used it as a justification to exploit the natives mercilessly for their own mercantile ends. For if you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him. It was not until 1537, with the papal bull of Paul III that the Indians were declared to be true men possessing souls. ~ Paul Auster

You're become a good friend, Arthur. I appreciate all you've done to help me since Warren's death. If we were to put the deeds of giving on a scale, your side would plunge downward compared to the paltry things I've done for you in return.'
She had no idea what she'd done for him, awakening him to love again, inspiring him to look beyond his own needs to someone else's. He started to tell her so, but she went on.
'But I can't look at years and weeks. I have to look at souls and sales. What would God have me view as the most valued?' She imitated the gesture he'd made earlier, raising one hand as high as her chin and lowering the other to midthigh. 'Souls, Arthur.' She balled the hand beside her leg into a tight fist, lifted it, and pressed it to her heart. 'Souls matter most. Even if it means I lose my mercantile - my home - I choose to love those children. ~ Kim Vogel Sawyer

Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you--Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age...Literature, for a while, can be about us...:about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel? ... Supposing...that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward--up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away. ~ Martin Amis

If you have a big splash of ecstasy in your life every day you are going to teach students something finer than "buy low/sell high". Maybe you'll teach them, not by what you say but by who you are, to live their lives as a standing affront to the ravaging mercantile mentality. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy. ~ John Carroll

[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. ~ James Madison

In the turbulent art arena they all pitch in and do their dubious and mercantile part in the rocambolesque saga of the art since so many judge art with their ears and the sound of the money. ("When is art?") ~ Erik Pevernagie

[Charles the Fifth], pretty much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land management, divine right, mercantile colonialization, and obedience to authority along the strict metaphysical line of the great chain of being. ~ Russell Shorto

Golosh Street is an interesting locality. All the oddities of trade seemed to have found their way thither and made an eccentric mercantile settlement. There is a bird-shop at one corner. Immediately opposite is an establishment where they sell nothing but ornaments made out of the tinted leaves of autumn, varnished and gummed into various forms. Further down is a second-hand book-stall. There is a small chink between two ordinary-sized houses, in which a little Frenchman makes and sells artificial eyes, specimens of which, ranged on a black velvet cushion, stare at you unwinkingly through the window as you pass, until you shudder and hurry on, thinking how awful the world would be if everyone went about without eyelids. Madame Filomel, the fortune-teller, lives at No. 12 Golosh Street, second storey front, pull the bell on the left-hand side. Next door to Madame is the shop of Herr Hippe, commonly called the Wondersmith.
("The Wondersmith") ~ Fitz-James O'Brien

Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity: ... ~ Adam Smith

American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced army and navy the world had ever seen. ~ Rick Atkinson

The difference between the genius of the British constitution, which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot, perhaps, be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries. ~ Adam Smith

I don't know it is that I always feel that other people can create things but that I can't. I imagine it's simpler living in remote tribes or communities where one is obliged to have a go or else you have to do without. I suppose it is fear of failure in an age where political correctness is trying to erase the word 'failure' from the language. It's OK to fail isn't it, but only if you've tried? What is so bizarre is that when one does try, one rarely falls short. Obviously some people do things better than others but if it gives you pleasure, then so what? As my grandmother used to say, 'patience and perseverance made a bishop of his reverence!' So don't say you can't make candles or soap or that you can't spin or weave until you've tried it. As for mending, well, if you're not throwing everything away, then you have no option but to make do and mend. After all, the only way to get rid of shopping malls and supermarkets with their food miles is for people not to shop in those places and the way to cure this mercenary mercantile world is to make your own things. ~ Clarissa Dickson Wright

Financial bitterness could not eat too deeply into Mack and the boys, for they were not mercantile men. They did not measure their joy in goods sold, their egos in bank balances, nor their loves in what they cost. ~ John Steinbeck

The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what merchant, what laborer ever sees a tax gatherer of the United States? ~ Thomas Jefferson

Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that men of business rarely know the meaning of the word 'rich'. At least, if they know, they do not in their reasoning allow for the fact, that it is a relative word, implying its opposite 'poor' as positively as the word 'north' implies its opposite 'south'. Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pockets depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it, - and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor. ~ John Ruskin

The mercantile business did not suit me. ~ John James Audubon

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence. ~ Lord Byron

There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre. ~ Amadeo Bordiga

A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

The end of something, that specific mid-century American upper-middle-class WASP East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby... I felt nothing but regret. I do not suffer loss well... Their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...dislodged, then replaced...powerful now only in the heads of their children, the children of Little America... When we die, they'll vanish forever. ~ Henry Bromell

Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics. ~ Northrop Frye

Late Friday morning I was driving toward Boulder. I was seated in "Doctor Lovebeads Cosmic Wonderbus and Mobile Mercantile." That entire phrase was painted in psychedelic colors on both sides of the van. But I left out the possessive apostrophe on "Lovebus[']" in order to show my contempt for bourgeois conformity. ~ Gary Reilly

One exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national character ~ Mikhail Bakunin

The mysteries of death and birth occupy women far more than is the case with men, to whom political and mercantile speculations are more congenial. ~ James Stephens

Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force
and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments
the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place. ~ Michel Foucault

They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next. ~ Lauren Willig

There were three of them outside the mercantile - women - and one of them was juggling. I blinked, thinking the magistrate had made a mistake. This was a girl I might have eagerly bought a drink for last night, but there was no mistaking she was outfitted for trouble, a sword hanging from one hip and two knives from the other. Her long black hair hung loosely over her shoulders, and she laughed and chatted with the store clerk as she continued to juggle, and then -
I jabbed Mason. "Did you see that?"
"See what?"
"She just nicked an orange! ~ Mary E. Pearson