priceless

The object of Political Economy is not to buy, nor to sell labour, — but to spare it. Every attempt to buy or sell it is, in the outcome, ineffectual; — so far as successful, it is not sale, but Betrayal; and the purchase money is a part of that typical thirty pieces which bought, first the greatest of labours, and afterwards the burial field of the Stranger; for this purchase-money, being in its very smallness or vileness the exactly measured opposite of "vilis annona amicorum," makes all men strangers to each other.


Note by John Ruskin to the essay Nature Of Wealth from Essays On Political Economy