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Cheapness is a great virtue.
Oct 1, 2025
Manufacturers...gradually shift their places, leaving those countries and provinces which they have already enriched, and flying to others, whether they are allured by the cheapness of provisions and labour.
Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense. A composition for cheapness and not excellence of workmanship is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufacturers.
The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.
The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.
Wait! Don't applaud my cheapness! I've got other crap I need help with!
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.
The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.
Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.
That religion which costs a man nothing is usually worth nothing.
The natural impulses of every thoroughbred include his sense of honor; his love of fair play and courage; his dislike of pretense and of cheapness.
People who know their worth can live austerely; it's the people nagged by the gnawing knowledge of their own cheapness who have that eternal necessity for submerging themselves in what they feel is superlative in material things, as if fine possessions could make them fine.
Education is cheap; experience is expensive.
Good work ain't cheap, cheap work ain't good.
Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.
There is a gulf between the high value Americans put on life in theory and its cheapness in practice.
The country has its charms-cheapness for one.
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.
Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.
Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.
Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.
Demand and supply are the opposite extremes of the beam, whence depend the scales of dearness and cheapness; the price is the point of equilibrium, where the momentum of the one ceases, and that of the other begins.
People want to buy cheap and sell dear; this by itself makes them countertrend. But the notion of cheapness or dearness must be anchored to something. People tend to view the prices they’re used to as normal and prices removed from these levels as aberrant. This perpective leads people to trade counter to an emerging trend on the assumption that prices will eventually return to “normal”. Therein lies the path to disaster.
When a thing is bought not for its use but for its costliness, cheapness is no recommendation. As Sismondi remarks, the consequence of cheapening articles of vanity, is not that less is expended on such things, but that the buyers substitute for the cheapened article some other which is more costly, or a more elaborate quality of the same thing; and as the inferior quality answered the purpose of vanity equally well when it was equally expensive, a tax on the article is really paid by nobody: it is a creation of public revenue by which nobody loses.
The speed of communication, the speed of information transfer, the cheapness of communication, the ease of moving things around the world are a difference in kind as well as degree.
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].
Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.
In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march. ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices -- that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities.
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