merchants QUOTES

21 " Only merchants have money to waste, and what are they but parasites who create nothing, grow nothing, make nothing but feed off another's labor? "

― James Clavell , Shōgun

22 " There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place.... "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

23 " Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Broken Homes (Rivers of London, #4)

24 " The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce. "

― H.W. Brands , The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

25 " They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn't steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money. "

― Terry Pratchett , Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind #5)

26 " If money could motivate the merchants of England to cross death-defying oceans and enter the interior of China at great personal risk of the loss of life, could not the love of Christ motivate the missionaries to do the same for the sake of the gospel? "

27 " individuals are concerned not
with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with
the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that
these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is
largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we
do not have a moral concern in these moral matters. As
performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given
over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our
minds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but it
may well be that the more attention we give to these goods,
th e more d is ta n t we feel from them and from those who are
believing enough to buy them. To use a different imagery,
the very obligation and profitablility of appearing always in
a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces
us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of
the stage. "

― Erving Goffman

28 " And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on. "

― Douglas Adams , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)

29 " Whose merchants are princes. "

30 " There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction. "

31 " Inside every adult there's still a child that lingers. We're happiness merchants - giving people the opportunity to dream like children. "

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