The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

The laws of economics are to be compared with the laws of the tides, rather than with the simple and exact law of gravitation. For the actions of men are so various and uncertain, that the best statement of tendencies, which we can make in a science of human conduct, must needs be inexact and faulty.

And very often the influence exerted on a person’s character by the amount of his income is hardly less, if it is less, than that exerted by the way in which it is earned.

But if inventions have increased man’s power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities.

Nature’s action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

Producer’s Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings.

Economics has as its purpose firstly to acquire knowledge for its own sake, and secondly to throw light on practical issues. But though we are bound, before entering on any study, to consider carefully what are its uses, we should not plan out our work with direct reference to them.

The modern developments of economic science in relation to rent indicate progress. For we are learning that what is commonly called the rent of land is really a very complex thing made up of many elements, some of which differ more widely from one another than it, as a whole, differs from profits, or than some elements of it differ from wages.

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings