Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

The manner in which things exist and take place, constitutes what is called the nature of things; and a careful observation of the nature of things is the sole foundation of all truth.

The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.

All those who, since Adam Smith, have turned their attention to Political Economy, agree that in reality we do not buy articles of consumption with money, the circulating medium with which we pay for them. We must in the first instance have bought this money itself by the sale of our produce.

The theory of interest was wrapped in utter obscurity, until Hume and Smith dispelled the vapor.

If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit' which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lent its support.

The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties.

Nothing can be more idle than the opposition of theory to practice!

Supply creates its own demand.

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

Political economy has only become a science since it has been confined to the results of inductive investigation.

To a proprietor of a mine, the silver money is a produce with which he buys what he has occasion for. To all those through whose hands this silver afterwards passes, it is only the price of the produce which they themselves have raised by means of their property in land, their capitals, or their industry. In selling them they in the first place exchange them for money, and afterwards they exchange the money for articles of consumption.

To the labor of man alone Smith ascribes the power of producing values. This is an error. A more exact analysis demonstrates... that all the values are derived from the operation of labor, or rather from the industry of man, combined with the operation of those agents which nature and capital furnish him.

I'il n'est pas en notre pouvoir de changer la nature des choses. Il faut les йtudier telles qu'elles sont.