Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

The wants of mankind are supplied and satisfied out of the gross values produced and created, and not out of the net values only.

One product is always ultimately bought with another, even when paid for in the first instance with money.

The most effectual encouragement to population is, the activity of industry, and the consequent multiplication of the national products.

Demand and supply are the opposite extremes of the beam, whence depend the scales of dearness and cheapness; the price is the point of equilibrium, where the momentum of the one ceases, and that of the other begins.

The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet.

Wherefore it is impossible to succeed in comparing wealth of different eras or different nations. This, in political economy, like squaring the circle in mathematics, is impracticable, for want of a common mean or measure to go by.

When a tree, a natural product, is felled, is society put into possession of no greater produce than that of the mere labour of the woodman?

With no fixed opinions in relation to the causes of public prosperity, the nation, like a ship without chart or compass, was driven about by the caprice of the winds and the folly of the pilot, alike ignorant of the place of her departure or destination.

All travellers agree that protestant are both richer and more populous than catholic countries;and the reason is, because the habits of the former are more conducive to production.

Capital in the hands of a national government forms a part of the gross national capital.

It is a melancholy but an undoubted fact, that, even in the most thriving countries, part of the population annually dies of mere want. Not that all who perish from want absolutely die of hunger; though this calamity is of more frequent occurrence than is generally supposed.

Capital can seldom be made productive, without undergoing several changes both of form and of place, the risk of which is always more or less alarming to persons unaccustomed to the operations of industry; whereas, on the contrary, landed property produces without any change of either quality or position.

If the community wish to have the benefit of more knowledge and intelligence in the labouring classes, it must dispense it at the public charge.

The difficulty lies, not in finding a producer, but in finding a consumer.

capital cannot be more beneficially employed, then in strengthening and aiding the productive powers of nature.