Alfred Marshall quotes

Alfred Marshall was a renowned British economist and one of the founders of modern microeconomics. His influential work, "Principles of Economics," helped establish key concepts such as supply and demand, elasticity, and marginal utility. He shaped economic thought for generations and continues to be studied by students worldwide. Here are 30 of his quotes:

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

Alfred Marshall

Consumption may be regarded as negative production.

Alfred Marshall

The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes.

Alfred Marshall

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

Alfred Marshall

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.

Alfred Marshall

Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.

Alfred Marshall

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings.

Alfred Marshall

All labour is directed towards producing some effect.

Alfred Marshall

Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.

Alfred Marshall

In 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 Marshall

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

Alfred Marshall

Knowledge is our most powerful engine of production.

Alfred Marshall

The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves.

Alfred Marshall

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

Alfred Marshall

The love for money is only one among many.

Alfred Marshall

It is common to distinguish necessaries, comforts, and luxuries; the first class including all things required to meet wants which must be satisfied, while the latter consist of things that meet wants of a less urgent character.

Alfred Marshall

The commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm.

Alfred Marshall

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

Alfred Marshall

In the absence of any short term in common use to represent all desirable things, or things that satisfy human wants, we may use the term Goods for that purpose.

Alfred Marshall

There has always been a temptation to classify economic goods in clearly defined groups, about which a number of short and sharp propositions could be made, to gratify at once the student's desire for logical precision, and the popular liking for dogmas that have the air of being profound and are yet easily handled. But great mischief seems to have been done by yielding to this temptation, and drawing broad artificial lines of division where Nature has made none. The more simple and absolute an economic doctrine is, the greater will be the confusion which it brings into attempts to apply economic doctrines to practice, if the dividing lines to which it refers cannot be found in real life. There is not in real life a clear line of division between things that are and are not Capital, or that are and are not Necessaries, or again between labour that is and is not Productive.

Alfred Marshall

I am myself an uncompromising anti-Jingoe, a peace-at-almost-any-price man. Chamberlain is the only Unionist public man whom I have ever thoroughly distrusted. Excepting Napoleon, I believe that England's true greatness has had no such dangerous enemy since Lord North. When a radical, he delighted to dish his colleagues even more than to flout his opponents. He is now engaged in dishing his new colleagues and flouting his old friends.

Alfred Marshall

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing.

Alfred Marshall