John Ruskin Quotes

Everyone lives by selling something.

Wherever a ship ploughs the sea, or a plough furrows the field; wherever a mine yields its treasure; wherever a ship or a railroad train carries freight to market; wherever the smoke of the furnace rises, or the clang of the loom resounds; even in the lonely garret where the seamstress plies her busy needle--there is industry.

Money is the great instrumentality for manufacturing.

Everything in the world is purchased by labor.

Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

Value denotes a relation reciprocally existing between two objects, and the precise relation which it denotes is the quantity of the one which can be obtained in exchange for a given quantity of the other.

Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce; but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one commodity for another

Each Country have their peculiar most suitable Productions; and likewise that different Men have Genius's adapted to Variety of different Arts and Manufactures, Therefore Commerce, or the Exchange of one Commodity or Manufacture for another, is highly convenient and beneficial to Mankind

Money is the best rule of commerce.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

The life of Liverpool is commerce; it is a city of warehouses and shops.

People so primitive that they did not know how to get money except by working for it.

Now, Gold and Silver contribute very little in their own nature to our Lives, for which all Earthly Things seem to have been created. Yet Men, as if they would make Nature asham'd of this, have agreed to make those Metals of equal vaue to all other things, to make 'em the Price and Measrue of all, and the Instruments of changing and exchanging whatever can be found good in this World.

Let us sell merchandise to the Spanish and obtain from them gold and silver.

The quantity of industry therefore not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock or capital which sets it in motion; but, in consequence of this increase, the division of labour becomes extended, new and more powerful implements and machines are invented, and the same quantity of labour is thus made to produce an infinitely greater quantity of commodities.

Considering how advantageous it would be to this realm to reestablish its foreign and domestic commerce, ... we have resolved to establish a council particularly devoted to commerce, to be held every fortnight in our presence, in which all the interests of merchants and the means conducive to the revival of commerce shall be considered and determined upon, as well as all that which concerns manufactures.

Labor alone creates and pays the profits of capital.

Money performs but a momentary function … when the transaction is finally closed, it will always be found, that one kind of commodity has been exchanged for another

When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?

Food is a noble thing to trade.

For the vast majority of mankind's history, economic activity consisted of finding energy and using energy.

Gold and iron are good To buy iron and gold.

We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.

Throughout history households had consumed most of the things that they produced and produced most of what they consumed.

There can be no freedom of trade where there is no freedom of man, for the first of all commodities to be exchanged is labour, and the freedom of man consists only in the exercise of the right to determine for himself in what manner his labour shall be employed, and how he will dispose of its products....