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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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