Market Forces Quotes

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

If we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them. ~ George Soros

The education system is where young skulls full of mush are programmed and propagandized into the system. They are highly valuable. That's why they're subsidized. You know, universities are approaching the same circumstance we have in health care. What it costs is not related at all to market forces. Meaning what it costs is not related to what people can afford. You get right down to it, how many Americans, how many families can afford 20,000, 30,000, $50,000 a year or semester to send their kids off to college? It has to be subsidized. ~ Rush Limbaugh

In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too. ~ Burt Rutan

Having financial independence does not increase one's chances of independent, artistic creation whatsoever. Our conditioned behavior toward mimicry for the sake of market forces is an amazing syndrome. The watchtowers guide us well. ~ Fady Joudah

If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are. ~ Philip Kitcher

I'm not an expert in it, but it seems to me that you have to let the market forces go their course. ~ George Deukmejian

The ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic by-product of modern consumer society. It might even be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate markets means that disposibility and waste have become the spine of the system. To consume means, literally, to destroy or expend, and in the garbage crisis we confront the underlying truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities and market forces have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard to the long or even short-term future of life on the planet. ~ Stuart Ewen

Capitalism and market forces are very powerful in producing wealth and innovation. But we need to ensure that these forces act in the common interest. ~ Thomas Piketty

I really did not think much about the size of the transfer fee when I left Barcelona because it was all down to market forces, not me. ~ Luis Figo

The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed. ~ David Graeber

Market forces do not make cities, they destroy them ~ Charles Correa

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made. ~ Alan Rickman

Of course, as the United States built a safety net that excluded and punished black families, it created a wealth-building apparatus to buoy and enrich white ones. It is not market forces and individual effort alone that determine who succeeds and prospers and who remains impoverished and excluded in the United States, but government policy and deep-seated cultural and societal mores. ~ Annie Lowrey

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism-if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities ... You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer. ~ Bill Gates

Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail. ~ John Thorn

Singapore's tragedy is not the absence of idealism, but that it systematically rewards the individualistic majority and discourages the socially-conscious minority. This is at odds with Singapore's self-image as a communitarian Asian society, an image conjured up largely to justify the protection of family values and paternalistic government. In truth, the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business. Singapore's embrace of the market forces - based on the PAP's clear appreciation of the fact that people's desire to live in comfort is the most powerful force for civilisation's progress - has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically. The public has been privatised. ~ Cherian George

Health care costs are on the rise because the consumers are not involved in the decision-making process. Most health care costs are covered by third parties. And therefore, the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care. And there's no market forces involved with health care. ~ George W. Bush

Although socialism is widely held by the establishment to be outdated, the things that are most popular in British society today are little pockets of socialism, where areas of life have been excluded from the crude operation of market forces and are protected for the benefit of the community ~ Tony Benn

CEI in 1992 "advised" the Food and Drug Administration to approve recombinant bovine somatotropin, which is a bioengineered growth hormone. Now surely such recommendation would be accompanied by the further suggestion of labeling the resulting products so that consumer choice- that ultimate driver of market forces-could be openly exercised? Think again: the CEI argued that mandatory labeling of dairy products is "inappropriate" because it violates the First Amendment (which includes the right to free speech-of the cows?). ~ Massimo Pigliucci

Market forces will one day crush the Federal Reserve. One day, the market forces will reverse. ~ Marc Faber

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces. ~ Terry Pratchett

I hate the way market forces try to separate us out in to the appropriate demographic - basically in order to sell us things. We need to find stories that we can enjoy together, not separately. ~ Emma Thompson

Any so-called 'radical' strategy that seeks to empower the disempowered in the realm of social reproduction by opening up that realm to monetisation and market forces is headed in exactly the wrong direction. Providing financial literacy classes for the populace at large will simply expose that population predatory practices as they seek to manage their own investment portfolios like minnows swimming in a sea of sharks. Providing microcredit and microfinance facilities encourages people to participate in the market economy but does so in such a way as to maximise the energy they have to expend while minimising their returns. Providing legal title for land property ownership in the hope that this will bring economic and social stability to the lives of the marginalised will almost certainly lead in the long run to their dispossession and eviction from that space and place they already hold through customary use rights. ~ David Harvey

Global market forces will sort out those companies that do not have sound corporate governance. ~ Mervyn King

Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome. ~ James Dale Davidson

Pity me'
the unspoken words upon a nation's lips
'because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom
yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that. But mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that?' Then there is a murmur, as a last, despairing cry, the latest prayer
'Market forces, market forces.' Say it over and over, as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won't work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me. ~ Fay Weldon

The election of Shinzo Abe as the leader of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic party and now prime minister will have profound repercussions for Japan and East Asia. Most western commentary during the premiership of Junichiro Koizumi has been concerned with the extent to which Japan has allowed a freer rein to market forces. ~ Martin Jacques

Any business owner can tell you that if their company isn't performing profitably and up to standards, one of two things will happen: either you make changes to improve its efficiency, or a competitor will drive you out of business. Market forces have a way of cutting to the chase rather quickly. ~ J. B. Pritzker

It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law. ~ Ron Wyden

Bring market forces to bear on health care insurers. Creating a health care 'exchange,' one of the better ideas included in House Bill 3200, creates affordable, accessible and portable insurance for millions of Americans. ~ Andrew P. Harris

Economic growth is quite simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope, which must create specific institutions for the purpose and not rely solely on market forces or technological progress. ~ Thomas Piketty

Market forces have no intrinsically moral direction, which is why, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ethics should precede economics. But it doesn't have to ... We know this because we've seen the results of capitalism without conscience: the pollution of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat; the endangerment of workers; and the sale of dangerous products - from cars to toys to drugs. All in pursuit of ever-greater profits. ~ Arianna Huffington

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest.


At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public's side - that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies.


Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that th ~ Julian Assange

It is clear that both at home and abroad producers have been unwilling to trust their fortunes entirely to the unrestricted play of competition. Both in world and domestic markets businessmen have sought security by substituting collective controls for the free play of market forces. ~ George W. Stocking

It is never an idea, technology, market forces, or access to capital that makes a company innovative. What differentiates an innovative company from an average company is the people working inside the company. ~ Jag Randhawa

Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of 'I can' than 'I should' Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That's 'I can' thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can. ~ John Maeda

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived. ~ Vanessa Redgrave

Although all the major industrial countries and a multitude of business units participate in the world trade in chemicals, the forces of free competition do not rule the world markets. The techniques of business diplomacy frequently supplement and in some instances have supplanted independent decision making by separate producers in response to free market forces. The geographic and industrial areas within which particular companies will operate, the scale of their output, the prices of their products, the use or nonuse of their technology, have increasingly become objects of negotiation, subjects of national and international agreement. More and more the conference table has been taking the place of the market as a regulator if the chemical industries. ~ George W. Stocking

The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might rather than market forces. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

The greatest challenge of the next 50 years, I believe, will be to create dignified work for everyone ... not through handouts and charity, but through market forces. ~ Leila Janah

But the improvements will happen faster and last longer if we can channel market forces, including innovation that's tailored to the needs of the poorest, to complement what governments and nonprofits do. We need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today. ~ Bill Gates

The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything at all about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long) ~ Richard McKenzie

NGOs are now turning to market forces as a catalyst for change ~ Claude Martin

We preach about capitalism and the beauty of unfettered market forces determining price
but not when it comes to gas. When it comes to gas, we need it cheap, and the president had better get it for us, or else, we don't care how. ~ Bill Maher

Egalitarian policies are the best way to unite and empower people, and are also a necessary counterweight to the sometimes detrimental influence of market forces. ~ Johanna Siguroardottir

If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility. Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he's never counted. ~ Bella Pollen

But capitalism has not stood still since Marx's day. Writing in the middle years of the nineteenth century, Marx could not be expected to grasp the full consequences of his insights into the centralization of capital and the development of technology. He could not be expected to foresee that capitalism would develop not only from mercantilism into the dominant industrial form of his day - from stateaided trading monopolies into highly competitive industrial units - but further, that with the centralization of capital, capitalism returns to its mercantilist origins on a higher level of development and reassumes the state-aided monopolistic form. The economy tends to merge with the state and capitalism begins to "plan" its development instead of leaving it exclusively to the interplay of competition and market forces. To be sure, the system does not abolish the traditional class struggle, but manages to contain it, using its immense technological resources to assimilate the most strategic sections of the working class. ~ Murray Bookchin

We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite. ~ Thomas Piketty

In biology, the most basic assumptions of evolutionary theory elude otherwise able students who insist that the process of evolution is guided by a striving toward perfection. College students who have studied economics offer explanations of market forces that are essentially identical to those preferred by college students who have never taken an economics course. Equally severe biases and stereotypes pervade the humanistic segment of the curriculum, from history to art. Students who can discuss in detail the complex causes of the First World War turn right around and explain equally complex current events in terms of the simplest "good guy-bad guy" scenario. (This habit of mind is not absent from political leaders, who are fond of portraying the most complicated international situations along the lines of a Hollywood script.) Those who have studied the intricacies of modern poetry, learning to esteem T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, show little capacity to distinguish masterworks from amateurish drivel once the identity of the author has been hidden from view. ~ Howard Gardner

No one forces you to buy a Twinkie. But governments do force you to fight in their wars and pay for their bailouts. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

I bought the air freshener for four euro because it was a kind of artefact translated into many languages, and also because it was clearly an interpretation of a woman ( breasts belly apron eyelashes) and I had becomes confused by the signs for servicios in public places. I could not figure out why one sign was male and the other female. The most common stick figure sign was not particularly male or female. Did I need this aerosol to make things clearer to me? What kind of clarity was I after?
I had conquered Juan who was Zeus the thunderer as far as I was concerned, but the signs were all mixed up because his job in the injury hut was to tend the wounded with his tube of ointment. He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover. Are we all lurking in each other's sign? Do I and the woman on the air freshener belong to the same sign? Another aeroplane was flying above the market, it's metal body heavy in the sky. A male pilot I had met in the Coffee House had told me that an aircraft was always referred to as 'she'. His task was to keep her in balance, to make her a extension of his hands, to make her responsive to the lightest of touch. She was sensitive and needed to be handled delicately. A week later, after we had slept together, I discovered that he was also responsive to the lightest of touch.
It wasn't clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear. ~ Deborah Levy

In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy. ~ James Surowiecki

A serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People become reinforced in the paradigm that they are determined, and they produce evidence to support the belief. They feel increasingly victimized and out of control, not in charge of their life or their destiny. They blame outside forces - other people, circumstances, even the stars - for their own situation. ~ Stephen R. Covey

It's no accident that marketing professionals often describe it in military language: capturing market share, penetrating the customer base, defeating competitors. It can be declarative, propagandistic, uninvolving. But in its best moments it can also encapsulate a belief, a set of values, even a religion. ~ Tom Doctoroff

She raised her eyes to the heavens and asked God for a miracle to happen to help her escape the troubles at home. Actually, Emily wasn't sure whom exactly she was talking to, whoever or whatever was there in the sky, and yet she, for some reason, couldn't remember for sure when and how she discovered this magic way to change the reality, but intuitively, she felt some unexplainable and very strong soul-to-soul connection to whatever warmhearted senior forces she was talking to. ~ Sahara Sanders

Unlike much of orthodox medicine, alternative approaches to healing typically honor the wisdom and capability of the human body. Their goal is often to support and strengthen the powerful healing forces already at work within us. ~ John Robbins

The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like 'optics' or 'thermodynamics' are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artificially generating spherically symmetric gravity fields. Having ~ Ted Chiang

However, in the twenty-first century the majority of both men and women might lose their military and economic value. Gone is the mass conscription of the two world wars. The most advanced armies of the twenty-first century rely far more on cutting-edge technology. Instead of limitless cannon fodder, countries now need only small numbers of highly trained soldiers, even smaller numbers of special forces super-warriors and a handful of experts who know how to produce and use sophisticated technology. Hi-tech forces 'manned' by pilotless drones and cyber-worms are replacing the mass armies of the twentieth century, and generals delegate more and more critical decisions to algorithms. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it. ~ Mark Twain

Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces. ~ John Ruskin

Traders today complain of living in fear that chats from a bygone era will be dredged up and used against them. They paint a picture of a world where communications are monitored, compliance officers roam the trading floors and it's hard to make an honest living. Banks have finally got the picture, they claim. Market manipulation on the scale we've seen over the past few years is no longer possible. Time will tell (p. 174). ~ Gavin Finch

First, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955). ~ Paul Samuelson

A delegate shout out from the floor: "Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!" And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America's future. ~ Ralph Ellison

fetish: (n.) anything, such as the stock market, falsely believed by primitive peoples to possess divine, magical or supernatural qualities. ~ Sol Luckman

Nice flash," he said in an odd, strangely menacing way, like a dare and a put-down all together.

"Some of our forces are more special than others."

Odell tipped his head at the beret on Ian's head. "The beret says it all, right?"

"I would hope so. ~ Mary Calmes

It's not easy being number two. As a marketer, you have limited choices - you can pretend you're not defined by the market leader, or, you can embrace your position and go directly after your nemesis. ~ John Battelle

I think the actions taken by the (rate-setting) Federal Open Market Committee have been the appropriate actions. And I assume we will continue to take the appropriate actions, depending on what is happening with the data and the dynamics of the economy ~ Bill Vaughan

They're so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with 'em. They've such a passion for Liberty, that they can't help taking liberties with her. ~ Charles Dickens

Law should seek far more than mere reconciliation; it should be one of the great creative forces of our social life. ~ Mary Parker Follett

Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living. ~ Herbert Marcuse

Time is invisible. Unlike weight.
Ah, but maybe that wasn't true. You could feel weight, yes--when you were carrying too much, it made you ploddy--but wasn't it, like time, basically just a human construct? Hands on a clock, numbers on a bathroom scale, weren't they only ways of trying to measure invisible forces that had visible effects? A feeble effort to corral some greater reality beyond what mere humans thought of as reality? ~ Stephen King

as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention Russia's in 1998 - the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future. ~ Niall Ferguson

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries. ~ Erik Larson

It doesn't matter if you're photographing a porter in a market in Marrakech or you're photographing the king of Morroco. You have the same sympathetic approach to everybody. You be nice to everybody, basically. ~ Albert Watson

The Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption has launched a campaign to push the Destructive Gift!" (...) "The important thing (...) is that the Destructive Gift serves to destroy articles of every sort: just what's needed to speed up the pace of consumption and give the market a boost... ~ Italo Calvino

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this. ~ Nora Ephron

Gold belongs only in the portfolios of fearmongers and speculators. If you own gold in your portfolio, expect to not get paid an income, pay higher taxes on your returns, take a more volatile ride than the stock market, and get a long-term return lower than bonds. ~ Peter Mallouk

The beauty of the principle idea of string theory is that all the known elementary particles are supposed to represent merely different vibration modes of the same basic string. Just as a violin or a guitar string can be plucked to produce different harmonics, different vibrational patterns of a basic string correspond to distinct matter particles, such as electrons and quarks. The same applies to the force carriers as well. Messenger particles such as gluons or the W and Z owe their existence to yet other harmonics. Put simply, all the matter and force particles of the standard model are part of the repertoire that strings can play. Most impressively, however, a particular configuration of vibrating string was found to have properties that match precisely the graviton-the anticipated messenger of the gravitational force. This was the first time that the four basic forces of nature have been housed, if tentatively, under one roof. ~ Mario Livio

The market likes to lull you into the false security of high success rate techniques, which often lose disastrously in the long run. The general idea is that what works most of the time is nearly the opposite of what works in the long run. ~ William Eckhardt

The Republican Party and the conservative free market movement have been presidentially focused for too long. ~ Grover Norquist

Remember to write for yourself, not for a market and give yourself time to develop your own style, your own voice. It takes a lifetime. Enjoy it! ~ Michael Morpurgo

As you know President Bush has been traveling around the country trying to sell his new Social Security plan. He wants to take our retirement money and invest it in the stock market. He says nothing can go wrong. I'll mention that to Martha Stewart the next time I see her. ~ Jay Leno

The vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community. ~ Hannah

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone? ~ Walter Isaacson

In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane ~ Charlie Chaplin

Either you must control your thoughts or the outside forces will control them and be warned that the outside forces usually consist of fears, worries and doubts. ~ Maddy Malhotra

Kensington Market is a must visit place in Toronto. ~ Mary Elizabeth Winstead

He's as bad as my mother. Maybe worse. He's a market-research consultant. He studies people's facial expressions to see how they feel about commercials and products. He used to be a psychologist but he makes more money helping big corporations dupe the public. The worst part is he can look at your face and say 'Your upper lip just twitched! Anger! You're angry. Don't try to hide it from me, young man. Why does it make you angry when I say those pants make you look like a girl? Doe you have something against girls? Perhaps some unresolved Oedipal feelings? ~ Natalie Standiford

In a sense, the farmer was the looniest speculator in a nation overrun with them. He was wagering he would master this fathomlessly intricate global game, pay off his many debts, and come out with enough extra to play another round. On top of that, he was betting on the kindness of Mother Nature, always supremely risky. But the farmer had no choice if he hoped to sustain himself and a way of life, the family farm. Instead, he was drawn into a kind of social suicide. The family farm and the whole network of small-town life that it patronized were being washed away into the rivers of capital and credit that flowed toward the railroads, banks, and commodity exchanges, toward the granaries, wholesalers, and numerous other intermediaries that stood between the farmer and the world market. Disappearing into all the reservoirs of capital accumulation, the family farm increasingly remained a privileged way of life only in sentimental memory.

Perversely the dynamic Lincoln had described as the pathway out of dependency - spending a few years earning wages, saving up, buying a competency, and finally hiring others - now operated in reverse. Starting out as independent farmers, families then slipped inexorably downward, first mortgaging the homestead, then failing under intense pressure to support that mortgage (they called themselves "mortgage slaves") and falling into tenancy - or into sharecropping if in the South - and finally ending where Lincoln's story began, as dispos ~ Steve Fraser

[In picking stocks] You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market. ~ Charlie Munger

You do learn things and one of them is that happiness has nothing to do with validation from other people, the important thing is being happy with yourself ... finding something that is important to you and sticking with it no matter what anyone says. The truth is you've got to really be tough because there are all kinds of forces that are always trying to get you to do things their way ... trying to tell you that you are throwing your life away if you don't follow their advice. ~ Kurt Cobain

You can say on one hand the market is crazy but it's not 1999. People have had their medicine from overexuberance. I find it really interesting that those two businesses, Yahoo! and Google, which are just online advertising businesses, are valued at more than the media behemoths in America. ~ James Packer