Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

Valuation is vague and arbitrary, when there is no assurance that it will be generally acquiesced in by others.

Law has been unjustly charged with the whole blame of the calamities resulting from the scheme that bears his name.

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.

And let no government imagine, that, to strip them of the power of defrauding their subjects, is to deprive them of a valuable privilege. A system of swindling can never be long lived, and must infallibly in the end produce much more loss than profit.

At Newfoundland, it is said, that dried cod performs the office of money,

What would people think of a tradesman, that was to give a ball in his shop, hire performers, and hand refreshments about, with a view to benefit his business?

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.

What is the motive which operates in every man's breast to counteract the impulse towards the gratification of his wants and appetites?

Nothing is more dangerous in practice, than an obstinate, unbending adherence to a system, particularly in its application to the wants and errors of mankind.

Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity.

regulation is useful and proper, when aimed at the prevention of fraud or contrivance, manifestly injurious to other kinds of production, or to the public safety, and not at prescribing the nature of the products and the methods of fabrication.

Freedoms and apprenticeships are likewise expedients of police,not of that wholesome branch of police, whose object is the maintenance of the public and private security, and which is neither costly nor vexatious; but of that sort of police which bad governments employ to preserve or extend their personal authority at any expense.

A tax can never be favorable to the public welfare, except by the good use that is made of its proceeds.

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.

I have made no distinction between the circulation of goods and of money, because there really is none.