Quotes by Alfred Marshall

• The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.
• Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.
• Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.
• Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.
• It is common to distinguish necessaries, comforts, and luxuries; the first class including all things required to meet wants which must be satisfied, while the latter consist of things that meet wants of a less urgent character.
• In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
• In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.
• Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.
• The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes.
• Consumption may be regarded as negative production.
• 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.
• And very often the influence exerted on a person's character by the amount of his income is hardly less, if it is less, than that exerted by the way in which it is earned.
• In the absence of any short term in common use to represent all desirable things, or things that satisfy human wants, we may use the term Goods for that purpose.
• All wealth consists of desirable things; that is, things which satisfy human wants directly or indirectly: but not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth.
• Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.
• Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.
• Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree.
• All labour is directed towards producing some effect.