Home > Topic > a commodity
1 " Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: " I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be " different" ...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way. "
2 " Knowledge is a commodity to be shared. For knowledge to pay dividends, it should not remain the monopoly of the selected few. "
― Moutasem Algharati
3 " It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready.But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division...Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: " relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from. "
4 " If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production, now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by force.In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange… such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities. Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away with this relationship and make another world possible. "
5 " We must stop seeing the natural world as a commodity and start seeing it as we would see a family member, something to love, protect, care for, and cherish. "
― , Teachers in the Forest: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
6 " Peace, a commodity purchased with friendship and safety and anything comfortable and all things familiar; peace that was a pleasant melody playing through the moments of their day; a chord striking only the notes of security and agreement and understanding and order. "
― Dan Groat , A Punctual Paymaster
7 " He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less that the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as a commodity rather than as a sovereign state's means of exchange. "
― Robert A. Heinlein , For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs
8 " Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent. "
― Mary Deal , River Bones (Sara Mason Mysteries #1)
9 " Mystery is a commodity for society that willing to buy it. "
― Toba Beta , Master of Stupidity
10 " Releasing a slow breath, she raised her chin and finally turned her gaze on Qureshi. The moment their gazes connected she felt a surge of power go through her. Throughout her nine hellish months of captivity, she’d been forbidden to look him in the eye. She’d known better than to even try, because she’d known what would happen to her if she did. But they weren’t in Afghanistan anymore and he was no longer the one calling the shots. She held the authority now. Her life, her opinions, had value here. And her voice, silenced for so long, would now speak for all the victims unable to. Her voice would not only be heard here in this courtroom—it would be his undoing.Qureshi stared back at her with an insolent, almost bored disdain on his scratched face, making it clear what he thought of her. To him she was nothing but an infidel whore, a commodity less valuable than a goat or mule, to be bought and sold whenever it suited him, handed out to one of his soldiers as a prize of war. Well this infidel whore is about to bury you, you son of a bitch. Holding that cold, hateful gaze in the taut, hushed silence that filled the courtroom, she sent him another silent message. Let him see it in her eyes. You didn’t break me. I’m no longer afraid of you. You no longer have the power to hurt me or anyone I care about. And by God, I’ll make sure you never have the chance to hurt anyone else again. "
― Kaylea Cross , Avenged (Hostage Rescue Team #5)
11 " Trust had become a commodity that few could afford. "
― Kimberly Derting
12 " Resilience is not a commodity you are born with, waiting silently on tap. It is self-manufactured painstakingly over time by working through your problems and never giving up, even in the face of difficulty or failure. "
― Lorii Myers , No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book (3 Off the Tee, #3)
13 " You are what you consume, and as an organism and consciousness, you in fact become a commodity and predator yourself. "
― Bryant McGill , Voice of Reason
14 " She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls. "
― Lauren DeStefano , Sever (The Chemical Garden, #3)
15 " We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. "
― Aldo Leopold
16 " A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught. "
― Mark Twain
17 " Always remember the hankering for the 'other' is never for them, but to use them as a means of your EGO, you turn them into a commodity and thats why every relationship gets ruined. Mind YOU! "
18 " We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin
19 " Battle scars were not a commodity that I was accustomed to selling, least of all to myself. "
― Gina Marinello-Sweeney , The Rose and the Sword (The Veritas Chronicles #2)
20 " Escape is a commodity like anything else "
― Iain M. Banks , The Player of Games (Culture, #2)
