“Whenever the current of money is forcibly stopped, and when money is prevented from settling at its just level, there are no limits to the possible variations of the exchange.”

Profits might also increase, because improvements might take place in agriculture, or in the implements of husbandry, which would augment the produce with the same cost of production.

If then the prosperity of the commercial classes, will most certainly lead to accumulation of capital, and the encouragement of productive industry; these can by no means be so surely obtained as by a fall in the price of corn.

Neither machines, nor the commodities made by them, rise in real value, but all commodities made by machines fall, and fall in proportion to their durability.

There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits.

Called an inquiry into the laws which determine the division of the produce.

The variation in the value of money, however great, makes no difference in the rate of profits.

A rise in wages, from an alteration in the value of money, produces a general effect on price, and for that reason it produces no real effect whatever on profits.

As the revenue of the farmer is realized in raw produce, or in the value of raw produce, he is interested, as well as the landlord, in its high exchangeable value, but a low price of produce may be compensated to him by a great additional quantity.

But a tax on luxuries would no other effect than to raise their price. It would fall wholly on the consumer, and could neither increase wages nor lower profits.

For price is everywhere regulated by the return obtained by this last portion of capital, for which no rent whatever is paid.

There can be no greater error then in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.

Whenever, then, the usual and ordinary rate of the profits of agricultural stock, and all the outgoings belonging to the cultivation of land, are together equal to the value of the whole produce, there can be no rent.

It is not by the absolute quantity of produce obtained by either class, that we can correctly judge of the rate of profit, rent, and wages, but by the quantity of labour required to obtain that produce.

Money is neither a material to work upon nor a tool to work with.

The wheat bought by a farmer to sow is comparatively a fixed capital to the wheat purchased by a baker to make into loaves.

The price of corn will naturally rise with the difficulty of producing the last portions of it.

We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

So it’s a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what’s good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

Calculate a stock’s price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham’s formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.

Enthusiasm is the electric current that keeps the engine of life going at top speed. Enthusiasm is the very propeller of progress.

I often call my current work pornographic – when I don’t, I can always be sure someone else will.

The experimental investigation by which Ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole, theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full grown and full armed, from the brain of the ‘Newton of Electricity’.

One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account.