These surplus quotes will inspire you. Surplus, an amount of something left over when requirements have been met; an excess of production or supply over demand.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging surplus quotes, surplus sayings, and surplus proverbs.
Best Surplus Quotes
- “Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.” ~ Andrew Carnegie
- “A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.” ~ Aneurin Bevan
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“If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “Rather than squander the surplus on tax breaks for the rich, we should add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program, shore up Social Security, fortify our defense, provide a quality public education and offer economic assistance to rural areas.” ~ Bennie Thompson
- “A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.” ~ John C. Calhoun
- “Dog – a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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“Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of oil.” ~ Daniel Yergin
- “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” ~ Cecil Rhodes
- “When we were at peace, Democrats wanted to raise taxes. Now there’s a war, so Democrats want to raise taxes. When there was a surplus, Democrats wanted to raise taxes. Now that there is a mild recession, Democrats want to raise taxes.” ~ Ann Coulter
- “I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.” ~ Winston Churchill
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“Peace … is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.” ~ Cyril Connolly
- “The alarm must be sounded because it is the economic and social system of capitalism and imperialism that prevents the urgently needed full mobilization of the potential economic surplus and the attainment of rates of economic advancement that can be secured with its help.” ~ Paul A. Baran
- “In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national banknotes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
- “By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all “respectability” to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus.” ~ Paul A. Baran
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“The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can’t win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.” ~ Joseph Brodsky
- “Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed.” ~ Benjamin Graham
- “The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“President Clinton was able to achieve budget surpluses despite a divided government.” ~ Jim Cooper
- “Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm – which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.” ~ Wendell Berry
- “I want to reform the tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 – the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president; the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.” ~ Barack Obama
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“‘Code sharing’ is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need.” ~ Erik Naggum
- “Those who have left to seek entry under this new system – and it will be an efficient system – will not be awarded surplus visas, but will have to apply for entry under the immigration caps or limits that will be established in the future.” ~ Donald Trump
- “In order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets. […] The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.” ~ Cecil Rhodes
- “The surplus of society overrides all our traditions and shapes all our philosophies.” ~ Walter Weyl
- “Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston’s job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one.” ~ George Orwell
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“I hope that there will be no particular need for us to attract external funding. It is worth noting that despite the fact the turnover is smaller now we are still maintaining a trade surplus.” ~ Vladimir Putin
- “People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence.” ~ Scott Berkun
- “Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value… If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.” ~ Stephen Bayley
- “A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.” ~ Adam Zagajewski
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“Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what future time may be given you as uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
- “Why can’t people live with each other in peace? Why must everything be destroyed? Why must people go hungry while surplus food elsewhere in the world rots away? Oh why must people be so crazy?” ~ Anne Frank
- “Outlaw embryo farming, but allow using surplus embryos.” ~ Mitt Romney
- “He who has the base necessities of life should pay nothing; taxation on him who has a surplus may, if need be; extend to everything beyond necessities.” ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “In order for a society to survive, it must generate a sufficient level of physical production both to meet its current needs, and to produce a surplus for upgrading its productive powers.” ~ Robert Trout
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“Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment’s deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.” ~ Robert C. Solomon
- “I lowered taxes in New York. I reduced the size of government in New York. I took a $2.4 billion deficit and turned it into a $3.2 billion surplus. And I reduced taxes over 23 times or 23 times.” ~ Rudy Giuliani
- “Managing university finances is very tricky business. We’re nonprofits. We’re not supposed to accumulate large surpluses.” ~ Rick Levin
- “American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington. Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers. …The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.” ~ Ron Paul
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“If everyone would take only according to his needs and would leave the surplus to the needy, no one would be rich, no one poor, no one in misery.” ~ Saint Basil
- “The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages.” ~ Laurie Penny
- “Mitt Romney has a history of being a great job creator. Secondly, he was a great governor. He went from billions of dollars in the hole when he became governor to billions of dollars in surplus when he left. And he went from the loss of tens of thousands jobs when he became governor to the creation of 40,000 new jobs when he left office.” ~ John Kasich
- “The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.” ~ Ron Paul
- “Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve — and I believe this can be done — a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.” ~ John F. Kennedy
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“Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.” ~ Benjamin Graham
- “You’d rather have a surplus versus a shortage in your position.” ~ Kenneth Lay
- “With a Socialist government, there will not be a national surplus whilst there continues to be inequality.” ~ Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
- “We’re not giving what we’re called to give unless that giving affects how we live – affects what we put on our plate and where we make our home and hang our hat and what kind of threads we’ve got to have on our back. Surplus Giving is the leftover you can afford to give; Sacrificial Giving is the love gift that changes how you live – because the love of Christ has changed you. God doesn’t want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs because He is your first love.” ~ Ann Voskamp
- “The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.” ~ Karl Marx , Surplus quotes value
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“It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of “an abundance or surplus” arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.” ~ Benjamin Graham
- “By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.” ~ George Orwell
- “This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living.” ~ Carroll Quigley
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“The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It’s a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.” ~ Jerry Brown
- “My object, having a surplus to deal with, is to consider how I can deal with it to the greatest advantage to the consumer – how, without inflicting any injury on Canada, I can secure the most substantial benefit to this country, to the manufacturing, to the commercial, and to the agricultural interests. The real way in which we can benefit the working and manufacturing classes is, unquestionably, by removing the burden that presses on the springs of manufactures and commerce.” ~ Robert Peel
- “Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space.” ~ Isabel Paterson
- “They fight so much for two reasons. One is they don’t want to be blamed for breaking the spending caps. And secondly, they don’t want to be blamed for spending the Social Security surplus on non-Social Security problems.” ~ Robert Reischauer
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“I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.” ~ Alan Greenspan
- “The capitalists of a country which manages to capture foreign markets from other countries are able to increase their profits at the expense of the capitalists of the other countries. Similarly, a colonial metropolis may achieve an export surplus through investment in its dependencies.” ~ Michal Kalecki
- “Cooperation is in fact the living and productive pulsation of the multitude. Cooperation is the articulation in which an infinite number of the singularities are composed as productive essence of the new. Cooperation is innovation, richness, and thus the basis of the creative surplus that defines the expression of the multitude.” ~ Antonio Negri
- “Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labor, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?” ~ David Harvey
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“At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under separate national governments – there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses.” ~ Joan Robinson
- “The United States census records from 1850 to 1940, and all available Church records, uniformly show a preponderance of males in Utah, and in the Church. Indeed, the excess in Utah has usually been larger than for the whole United States… there was no surplus of women.” ~ John Andreas Widtsoe
- “Lack of money always means a surplus of creativity, in the best case.” ~ Joe Carnahan
- “Socialize the individual’s surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness.” ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
- “If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
