Rohini Nilekani Quotes

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Capital is a result of labor.

Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

Profit is proof that the capitalist has given something to society that it cherishes more than the material wealth it has given to the businessman.

There's nothing as real as money.

Value is consequently the necessary theoretical starting point whence we can elucidate the peculiar phenomenon of prices resulting from capitalist competition.

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

I mean, anything that money can be made off will never be a problem to make, no matter what it is.

Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.

You can very easily be turned into a commodity. I've grown up with it.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

Things are worth what they will fetch at a sale.

If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

People so primitive that they did not know how to get money except by working for it.

A market is a place set apart for men to deceive and get the better of one another.

Labor alone creates and pays the profits of capital.

The rich men, in free society, may, if they please, lounge about town, visit clubs, attend the theatre, and have no other trouble than that of collecting rents, interest and dividends of stock. In a well constituted slave society, there should be no idlers. But we cannot divine how the capitalists in free society are to put to work. The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value. But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitations.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

Capitalism does not require us to hold a particular set of cognitive beliefs; it only requires that we act as if certain beliefs (about money, commodities etc) are true. The rituals are the beliefs, beliefs which, at the level of subjective self-description, may well be disavowed.

Everyone's life is for sale in America.

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

The "value" or "worth" of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power.