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“Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, ploughs and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts, Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialized task will do it best.”
― xenophon, The Education of Cyrus

“From emotions to materials, it's all about buying and selling”
― Mehnaz Ansari

“The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs—no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire's extravagances.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out.

“We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man’s strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman’s beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace.

“This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly shaped as the boughs that toss in light. The present: it teems. At barely a spade’s depth the mouldy-warp travels beneath my feet: who can imagine what may live a fathom down? We cannot know for certain that the fables of serpents curving around roots of mighty trees, or of dragons guarding treasure in perpetual darkness, are without factual reality.

“How can any man own a thing so volatile and so rich? Yet we followers of Cain have made of our world a great carpet, whose pieces can be lopped off and traded as though it were inert as tufted wool.”
― Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Peculiar Ground

“The advent of the written word around 3300 BC lifted history's curtain and revealed an already well-established pattern of long-distance trade, not only in luxury and strategic goods, but in bulk staples such as grain and timber as well.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“The coming of the Prophet would sweep away this fragmented and pluralistic pattern of trade in the ancient world. Within a few centuries of Muhammad's death, one culture, one religion, and one law would unify the commerce of the Old World's three continents nearly a millennium before the arrival of the first European ships in the East.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“For most of the period following the fall of Rome, the adherents of a powerful new monotheistic religion dominated medieval long distance commerce as completely as the West dominates such commerce today; the legacy of that former dominance is still all too visible.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“The UK needs a post Brexit US trade deal like a hole in the head. Given America's out-of-control opioid crisis, fuelled by prescription drug addiction, along with an obesity epidemic like the world has never seen, why on earth would the UK want to open its doors to US healthcare companies ? So that they can wreak untold havoc and destroy our National Health Service ? No thanks !”
― Alex Morritt, Lines & Lenses

“The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“In those days the Pimas always had plenty.

The Papagos who lived in the desert south of us did not have a river like the Gila to water their fields, and their food was never plentiful.

During the summer months, some of them would come to our village, with cactus syrup put up in little ollas, and salt, and we would give them beans and corn in exchange.

The only salt we had came from the Papagos. At a certain time of the year they would go down to the ocean and get the salt from the shore where the tide left the water to dry. It was a kind of ceremony with them.

They always felt that we gave them more than they could give us, although to get the salt they had walked hundreds of miles to the ocean and back. And so they would stay with us for a few days and help us harvest our wheat.”
― George Webb, A Pima Remembers

“Learn the trade before you learn the tricks of the trade.”
― J. Earp

“I can pretend it’s all pretend! I can be the life of your death and you can be the death of my life�� what a trade-off!”
― Rebecca McNutt, Bittersweet Symphony

“What was it he [Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe of Sri Lanka] had heard in the street so many times today? Fair trade, not free trade. Well, the big boys -- the developed countries -- couldn't have either, if none of the former colonies agreed to participate. No factories for their clothes, no mines for their minerals, no markets for their subsidized rice and corn. Nobody to trade with, if that's what you wanted to call it. Charles was going to make sure they didn't go another round. He straightened his suit and stepped from the back door of the Sheraton. He looked down the street to where those city buses were parked. But first he was going to get some people out of jail.”
― Sunil Yapa, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

“It was ironic that even in promising to end aid dependence, Pakistan’s leaders sought trade on easier terms instead of retooling their economy to expand trade as many other countries have been able to do.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that their geographic, climatic, and intellectual endowments best enable them to do, and to exchange those goods for what is best produced elsewhere, trade has directly propelled our global prosperity.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Although the Anatolians and the people of the Indus Valley knew each other's products, it is not known whether or not they met each other face-to-face; rather, they would have been separated by an unknown number of middlemen.”
― william j. bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“People in markets find a way of getting down to the essentials of I have, you want; you have, I want.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“The expected value of something is not a good guide to its price.”
― Martin Baxter, Financial Calculus: An Introduction to Derivative Pricing

“Wars are bad for trade.”
― George R.R. Martin, The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones

“The incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual, and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe, and Africa. Riding on a rising tide of global trade along the land and sea routes of Asia, Islam came to dominate that continent's spiritual as well as its commercial life.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“The Umayyad and Abbasid empires were in effect large free-trade areas in which old borders and barriers had been swept away, especially along the Euphrates River, since remotest antiquity the traditional frontier between the East and West. No longer were the three great routes to Asia—the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Silk Road�� competing alternatives; rather, they were an integrated global logistic system available to all parties who recognized the suzerainty of the caliphate.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Abraham Lincoln described America as a 'nation conceived in Liberty' and our capitalist system is a consequence of that devotion to liberty: we are not free in order to engage in trade, rather we engage in trade because we are free to do so.”
― Michael Shindler

“If a country consumers more than it produces, it must import more than it exports. That's not a rip-off that's arithmetic.

If we manage to negotiate a reduction in the Chinese trade surplus with the United States, we will have increased trade deficits with some other country.

Federal deficit spending, a massive and continuing act of dissavings, is the culprit. Control that spending and you will control the trade deficit.”
― George Schultz

“Curst be the Gold and Silver which persuade
Weak Men to follow far-fatiguing Trade!
The Lilly-Peace outshines the silver Store,
And Life is dearer than the golden Ore.
Yet Money tempts us o'er the Desert brown,
To ev'ry distant Mart and wealthy Town:
Full oft we tempt the Land and Sea;
And are we only yet repay'd by Thee?
Ah! why was Ruin so attractive made,
Or why fond Man so easily betrayed?

-Eclogue the Second. Hassan; or the Camel-driver”
― William Collins, Gray and Collins: Poetical Works

“If I live life as some barter system, I will in fact never have given anything away except the opportunity to really live.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“if we want to eliminate terrorism
we have to destroy the business model of fear and weapon”
― Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"

“it isn’t just talent which is mobile today, the work itself is highly mobile too.”
― Gyan Nagpal, The Future Ready Organization: How Dynamic Capability Management Is Reshaping the Modern Workplace

“Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,�� he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.��
This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation?
More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade.
Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey.
The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,�� but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai.
If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence�� was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence�� argument is artificial.”
― Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century

“Don't trade your happy life in for a sad life because tragedy is happening simultaneously. (Take a moment to think on that statement.)��
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What are you trading your life for? Where is your time really going? You have freedom, but are you free? Remove self-imposed chains.”
― Richie Norton