Prices Topics

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I- Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.
—Robertson Davies (b. 1913)

To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them at a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature.
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)

I sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the scraps of newspapers in which some party had wrapped their luncheon.... I read these things at a vast advantage there, and it seemed to me that the advertisements, or what is called the business part of a paper, were greatly the best, the most useful, natural, and respectable. Almost all the opinions and sentiments expressed were so little considered, so shallow and flimsy, that I thought the very texture of the paper must be weaker in that part and tear the more easily. The advertisements and the prices current were more closely allied to nature, and were respectable in some measure as tide and meteorological tables are; but the reading-matter ... unless it was some humble record of science, or an extract from some old classic, struck me as strangely whimsical, and crude, and one-idea’d, like a school-boy’s theme, such as youths write and after burn.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)