John Stuart Mill Quotes

Every man lives by exchanging.

I'm a firm believer in the circle of commerce.

Self-interest leads to honing your skills, the better to trade with.

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.

Exchange is creation.

Trade is nothing else but a Commutation of Superfluities; for instance: I give mine, what I can spare, for somewhat of yours, which I want, and you can spare.

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

People are always trading their excess for somebody else's excess. One country has a lot of aluminum so they trade aluminum for sugar. It's the law of supply and demand.

The history of commerce is that of the communication of the people.

Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn.

Put two Yankees in a room together, and in an hour they will each have gained ten dollars from the other.

Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.

Even if the members of different communities find each other physically and/or behaviorally strange, irritating, or annoying, and do not want to associate as neighbors, they may still engage in mutually beneficial trade if they reside spatially separated from each other.

When he [the Prophet Muhammed] died, his shield was being held in mortgage by a Jew. This was in the mutual interests of all those concerned. The Prophet (peace be upon him) had to buy things to fulfill the needs of himself and his family. The same sale was beneficial to the Jew who made the sale. Life does not operate on the basis of striving to deprive others of securing their welfare. It can only operate on the basis that our striving to secure our own welfare implies that others can secure theirs as well.

Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce; but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one commodity for another

Let us sell merchandise to the Spanish and obtain from them gold and silver.

The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.

I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade of each becomes more valuable to the other.

For a relationship between two countries to be sustainable, it must be mutually beneficial.

… the woman whose husband makes twelve hundred dollars a year may have a couple of hours a day which she could sell in return for some service which she wishes to buy. There ought to be a reciprocity exchange in every town of any size where these exchanges could be arranged for. Nothing more than an extension of the old community way of living when everybody got together for barn raisings, and husking bees and each individual's special talent was called upon and everyone earned in one way or another what they got.

Each Country have their peculiar most suitable Productions; and likewise that different Men have Genius's adapted to Variety of different Arts and Manufactures, Therefore Commerce, or the Exchange of one Commodity or Manufacture for another, is highly convenient and beneficial to Mankind

Integration is a give and take.

By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.