Dudley North Quotes

Exchange is creation.

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.

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

Trade is a social act.

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.

Every man lives by exchanging.

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

Money was invented for a reason. We've seen people try to use beans, etc. and it doesn't work.

Value denotes a relation reciprocally existing between two objects, and the precise relation which it denotes is the quantity of the one which can be obtained in exchange for a given quantity of the other.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

Everybody trades off in some sense or another.

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

The ultimate benefit of trade is not the generating of economic surpluses but the more efficient allocation of economic resources.

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

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

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

You do not build your own houses, nor make your own garments, nor bake your own bread, simply because you know that if you were to attempt all these things they would all be more or less ill done.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

You have to give to be able to receive.

Giving triggers social cohesion. It's also the basis for an economy not based on money.

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.

Free trade is a two way street.

The market is not an invention of capitalism …. It is an invention of civilization.

Money was of no value whatever. Gold is quite unknown; it is thought to be brass; trade is carried on by barter alone. The people know nothing of money.

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