All wealth consists of desirable things; that is, things which satisfy human wants directly or indirectly: but not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth.

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.

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

The love for money is only one among many.

All labour is directed towards producing some effect.

Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree.

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.