Black Market Quotes

“The Bonaccorso brothers are serious muscle, though if they were any dumber they’d be dumber than rocks.”
― A.G. Russo, Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss

“...the cruelest thing you ever said to me was that you would always love me.”
― A.G. Russo, Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss

“Any time people create a "black market" to avoid government regulation, they are engaged in, and promoting, free market economics.”
― Dave Champion

“Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called "ghost marriages." Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a "wedding," and bury the couple together... A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides. Marriage brokers—usually respectable folk who find brides for village men—account for most of the middlemen. At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers—and now murderers.
—"China's Corpse Brides: Wet Goods and Dry Goods" The Economist, July 26, 2007”
― Danica Novgorodoff, The Undertaking of Lily Chen

“After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“A black market is the part of a free market that refuses to knuckle under to government oppression.”
― Starchild

“It doesn't matter if it's legal or not. It's unethical. You're marketing fetal tissue on the black market, and that's worse than unethical; it's barbaric.”
― Martha D. Ogburn, Progeny

“If you destroy a free market, you create a black market.”
― James C. Humes, The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill

“Money launderers, in Netherton’s experience of Flynne’s stub, were the sort of people least destabilized by discovering that their world was a branch of someone else’s. They immediately looked for advantage in the knowledge.”
― William Gibson, Agency

“In North America, it's estimated that $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly. The Forest Service has pegged the value of poached wood from its land at $100 million annually; in recent years, the agency estimates, 1 in 10 trees felled on public lands in the United States were harvested illegally. Associations of private timber companies gauge the value of wood stolen from them at around $350 million annually. In British Columbia, experts put the cost of timber theft from publicly managed forests at $20 million a year. Globally, the black market for timber is estimated at $157 billion, a figure that includes the market value of the wood, unpaid taxes, and lost revenues. Along with illegal fishing and the black-market animal trade, timber poaching contributes to a $1 trillion illegal wildlife-trade industry that is monitored by international crime organizations such as Interpol.”
― Lyndsie Bourgon, Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods