Quotes About Capital

Obviously, consideration of costs is key, including opportunity costs. Of course capital isn't free. It's easy to figure out your cost of borrowing, but theorists went bonkers on the cost of equity capital. They say that if you're generating a 100% return on capital, then you shouldn't invest in something that generates an 80% return on capital. It's crazy.

We are coming to see that there should be no stifling of labor by capital, or of capital by labor; and also that there should be no stifling of labor by labor, or of capital by capital.

During the period of capital moving from one employment to another, the profits on that to which capital is flowing will be relatively high, but will continue so no longer than till the requisite capital is obtained.

I don't like the idea of capitalism anyway. Because it's not capital we are talking about; it's knowledge and creating well-being. Because I mean, that gets people on the wrong track when it's capital and how we allocate capital - no. How do we create the Republic of Science in America? How do we have a system of mutual benefits where people succeed by helping others improve their lives? So I don't like that at all.

When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue.

Labor is superior to capital and precedes capital. Without labor, there is no capital.

It is significant that, as innocent babies are killed, and capital punishment is withheld from their murderers, the same men who plead for the murderer's life also demand the “right” to abortion. Usually, the same picketers that carry a sign one day, “Abolish Capital Punishment,” also carry “Legalize Abortion” another day. When this is called to their attention, their answer is, “There is no contradiction involved.” They are right: the thesis is “condemn the innocent and free the guilty.

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people.

History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

There are no 'holds.' Everyday you're either willing to buy more at the current price, or, if you aren't, you should redeploy the capital to something you believe does deserve incremental capital.

If one fourth of the capital of a country were suddenly destroyed, or entirely transferred to a different part of the world, without any other cause occurring of a diminished demand for commodities, this scantiness of capital would certainly occasion great inconvenience to consumers, and great distress among the working classes; but it would be attended with great advantages to the remaining capitalists.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.

Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.

I remember my very first encounter with Japan. At that time, I was Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg. Out of nowhere, Japan's Consul General in St Petersburg came to my office and said Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to invite me to Japan. I was very surprised because I had nothing to do with Japan except being a judoka. This was an opportunity to visit Tokyo and a couple of other cities. And, you know, a capital is a capital everywhere: there is the official script and certain protocol. It is always easier to talk in the provinces, the conversation is more natural.

There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population. The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and better goods can be produced and consumed. This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.

I have great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions. Our financial institutions, banks and investment banks, are strong. Our capital markets are resilient. They're efficient. They're flexible.

At a basic level venture capitalists are arbitrageurs: they have access to more information than those with the capital, and access to more capital than those with information, and they profit by exploiting the mismatch.

What does reflect reality very well is complexity theory, which comes from physics. I'm the one pioneering the idea of bringing it to capital markets. When you look at capital markets through the lens of complexity theory, you ask "what's the scale of the system?" Scale is a fancy word for size. What measures are you using? If you look at total debt, the concentration of assets in the five largest banks, what percentage of the total assets of the five largest banks are interconnected? What you see is a very densely connected, fragile system that could collapse at any moment.

I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

I say to the young, be happy that you were born in Italy because of the beauty of the human capital, both masculine and feminine, of this country... No other country has such human capital.

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, DC as the "capital of the free world." But it seems to me that Brussels, which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title.

These companies know that at their current size they're not going to be big enough to have the necessary capital, and they don't have enough spectrum to get to the third generation.

I will eliminate capital-gains taxes for the small businesses and the startups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow

Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft.

I'd always had a childhood ambition to go into the investment capital business, and spent twenty-odd years in it. But the thought of spending the second half of my career in the same business was boring, so I looked around for other opportunities .

We need to build a beautiful granite and bronze monument in our nation's capital to honor American heroes, unsung American heroes. And those unsung American heroes are the rich.

Welcome to Bologna on Capital Gold for England versus San Marino with Tennent's Pilsner, brewed with Czechoslovakian yeast for that extra Pilsner taste and England are one down!

Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

The avowed policy of non-co-operation has been not to make political use of the disputes between labour and capital.

In a society that has very high concentration of capital in a narrow sector of the population, that's going to influence everything in different ways.

We are all dependent upon the investment of capital.

We need a president that is sitting down, getting Americans to work, getting this economy going. That is the single most important thing that the president of the United States does, is create a climate where job creators know that they're going to be able to risk their capital and have a chance to have a return on the investment. And it's never too late to start that.

Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

There would be a cost for dumping carbon into our atmosphere and a cap on total emissions. The government must make a clear and firm decision - terminating the idea in our society it is free to pump infinite amounts of carbon into the air. Once that happens, private capital will flow even more aggressively into developing and deploying the alternative, less-polluting technologies.

Without market prices for capital goods, accounting is not possible. You don't know if you are making money or losing money, saving resources or wasting them, doing the right thing or not doing the right thing.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

America's political system is superior to the crony corrupt corrupt capital system in Russia in every way.

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

No arbitrary regulation, no act of the legislature, can add anything to the capital of the country; it can only force it into artificial channels.

I have an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassment affecting the growth of her independent political power, and the preservation of her territorial integrity.

Network marketing is really the greatest source of grass-roots capitalism, because it teaches people how to take a small bit of capital, that is your time, and build the American dream.

Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.

I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that's what I'm doing.

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)