James Buchan > Quotes

“My wages came to me not to satisfy any need-- mine were anyway private, affectionate, atrocious-- but to make my needs universal: to incorporate me in the mainstream of men and things in which my work was not for me but for everybody; and to take what was special in me, my most secure and precious sense of myself, and make it general and banal. In short, I was to be civilized.”
― James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

“Luck and Joy and Grief and I

Set off together into the world of existence

Luck lay down and Joy ran off

But Grief and I go wandering on.”
― James Buchan, The Persian Bride

“Because of an insularity among Englishmen, the country had been much represented abroad by foreigners. Under William III, those were Dutchmen, French Huguenots and Swiss and, in the later years of Anne's reign, by Scots now citizens of Great Britain.”
― James Buchan, John Law: A Scottish Adventurer in the Eighteenth Century

“Money is normative. So pervasive is its influence on our lives that it makes less moneyed ages incomprehensible, consigning them to barbarism or folklore. Yet history is not inevitable: antiquity did not aspire to our present condition and might have generated a quite different present.”
― James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

“Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.”
― James Buchan

“I have found the funerals of friends less harrowing than the auctioning off of their property: a unique and loveable nature, already contracted to its inert possessions, is broken into money and dispersed for all time.”
― James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money