David Ricardo Quotes

The only source of the generation of additional capital goods is saving. If all the goods produced are consumed, no new capital comes into being.

If you put a ten dollar bill under the rug instead of spending it, that is capital formation. It represents ten dollars' worth of something that might have been immediately consumed, but wasn't.

Savings is the fundamental input for capital investment, and capital investment is the primary ingredient in productivity.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

capital is the result of saving, and not of spending. The spendthrift who wastes his substance in riotous living decreases the capital of the country, and therefore the excuse often made for extravagance, that it is good for trade, is based upon false notions respecting capital.

Borrowing to build factories is not the economic equivalent of borrowing to buy television sets, and it’s amazing just how few modern economists can see the difference...Borrowing to produce is the way poor countries become rich. Borrowing to consume is the way rich countries become poor.

History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.

We need a tax code that promotes savings, investment, achievement, innovation, and hard work.

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.

I think for larger-scale entrepreneurship, it's true - for men and women - that people who already have capital tend to do better.

By far the greatest part of those goods which are the objects of desire, are procured by labour; and they may be multiplied, not in one country alone, but in many, almost without any assignable limit, if we are disposed to bestow the labour necessary to obtain them.

That the powers of labour, and of the other instruments which produce wealth, may be indefinitely increased by using their products as the means of further production.

The way we accumulate capital in our society is through trust.

Capital is a result of labor.

Capitalism without capital is just an ism.

As capital is thus the most essential element in setting industry in motion, so it is by the amount of it, that the productiveness of that industry is chiefly determined.

Labor alone creates and pays the profits of capital.

A tax on capital is self-defeating, in that it slows down capital accumulation, investment and economic growth.

It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.

The accumulation of capital involves the expansion of value over time.

The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed unhampered.

Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigalityand misconduct. By what a frugal man annually saves he not onlyaffords maintenance to an additional number of productive hands?but?he establishes as it were a perpetual fund for the maintenance of an equal number in all times to come.