Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree.
Alfred MarshallThough a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.
Alfred MarshallThe hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.
Alfred MarshallIn 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.
Alfred MarshallI 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.
Alfred Marshall