Alfred Marshall Quotes

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.

Knowledge is our most powerful engine of production.

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.

The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves.

Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

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.

Every short statement about economics is misleading (with the possible exception of my present one).

Consumption may be regarded as negative production.

The love for money is only one among many.

I admit that these terms and the diagrams connected with them repel some readers, and fill others with the vain imagination that they have mastered difficult economics problems, when really they have done little more than learn the language in which parts of those problems can be expressed, and the machinery by which they can be handled. When the actual conditions of particular problems have not been studied, such knowledge is little better than a derrick for sinking oil-wells erected where there are no oil-bearing strata.

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.

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.

We might as well reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by demand or supply.

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

The commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm.

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.

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.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

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.

Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree.

Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.

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 labour is directed towards producing some effect.

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.