Imports Quotes

Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no products within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal of our favor, that private hongs should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence.

By definition, by reducing our trade deficit we will be hurting consumers. Consumers are always better off with a trade deficit.

We must creep before we can walk. Protect the manufacturers for the present, and in a little time, they will protect themselves and us. They have the potential of releasing us from our dependence on foreigners and quieting their intrigues.

America has sent us many good things, gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo, but you are the first philosopher, and indeed, the first man of letters for whom we are beholden to her.

In 200 years when the United States will get all that it can from protectionism, it too will adopt free trade.

When someone says, `Let's impose tariffs on foreign imports,' it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works - but only for a short time....over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer. Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.

Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies.

We're a trading nation. We need to have trade, we rely on it, a vast proportion of our jobs in our country rely on trade agreements.

Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing capacity.

It’s much better than shutting down trade to help people adjust to the effects of trade.

Take the most effectual measures to arresting, detaining and securing any Gunpowder, or any sort of Arms or Ammunition which may be attempted to be imported into the province under your government.

Who taught us corruption? I believe it was you, frankly... It's an import.

It pains to see that some investors are importing raw commodities, although just on their door steps, similar produces are left to decay.

China must voluntarily cut back on exports to America otherwise American politics will become unmanageable.

I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. . . . This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor “one gallus” fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn’t believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones.

Texas is made for trade.

It is not repeated large Emissions [printing] of a base Paper-Currency, but our Imports exceeding our Exports, that occasions Silver to be ship'd off in Ballance

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

Free trade will bring widespread discontent. It will revolutionize values. It will take away more than one half the earning capacity of brain and brawn.

Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.

If there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed ... it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.

Nothing has ever been made plainer at a general election than that the controlling principle in the raising of revenue from duties on imports is zealous care for American interests and American labor. The people have declared that such legislation should be had as will give ample protection and encouragement to the industries and the development of our country.

The social and moral issues are all on the side of free trade. And it is you, and people like you, who introduce protection who are the ones who are violating fundamental moral and social issues. Tell me, what trade union represents the workers who are displaced because high tariffs reduce exports from this country, because high tariffs make steel and other goods more expensive, and as a result, those industries that use steel have to charge higher prices, they have fewer employees, the export industries that would grow up to balance the imports, tell me what union represents them? What moral and ethical view do you have about their interests?

Most of the jobs that are going from the United States are not going to other countries; they are going to machines.

We know full well we cannot sell where we do not buy and we cannot sell successfully where we do not carry.