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 labour is directed towards producing some effect.

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

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

The love for money is only one among many.

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.

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.