Business and economics - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Strangely late in the world's history, the obvious fact was perceived that no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people's livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles to be conducted for their personal glorification.

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

Buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization.

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

Nothing about your age is, at first sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from bedlam.

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

I explained that the laws of nature require a struggle for existence, and that in the struggle the fittest survive, and the unfit perish. In our economic struggle, I continued, there was always plenty of opportunity for the fittest to reach the top, which they did, in great numbers, particularly in our country; that where there was severe economic pressure the lowest classes of course felt it the worst.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the temple of Karnak on Egypt is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.

- Ray Bradbury, ''And the Moon Be Still As Bright'' (1948)

The hawkers were ignored by the hurrying throngs of people; anybody with a genuine system of prediction would be using it, not selling it.

- Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery (1955)

Junk is the ideal product . . . the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy . . .

- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

Politics is the enemy of a sound economic entity.

- Philip K. Dick, The Crack in Space (1965)

''Tanstaafl.'' Means ''there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.''

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

A profit is not without honor.

- Philip Josй Farmer, ''Riders of the PurpleWage'' (1967)

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

It's a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine.

- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Every transaction is for gain on one side or both, and the transaction that pretends to fair play is corrupt by definition. Corruption is the normal state of a society that restrains its excesses by law or morality.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. [. . .] The ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them.

- Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (1988)

That's a large part of what economics is

- people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney.We're a shopping species.

- William Gibson, Idoru (1996)

History, as every mature Aten knew, was simply the evolution of economics.

- Ralph A. Sperry, ''On Vacation'' (1998)