Top 108 Auction Quotes & Sayings

A pearl goes up for auction. No one has enough, so the pearl buys itself.

Stand up and pledge with me: A government of the United States is not on the auction block. And America is not for sale!

This isn't like an auction, right? You guys aren't going to take it away?

There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.

Sultan Beyazid considered his father's art collection decadent and ordered it sold at auction.

One of the reasons why we can make a lot of money in equity markets is because they're auction-driven, and auction-driven markets are very different from almost any other kind of market.

Despite all the efforts of art dealers, the number of Rembrandts existing at a given time is limited; yet such paintings are commonly disposed of by auction.

All the auction houses care about is the selling of luxury goods.

I started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty.

My first ball I ever got from a big-league player I actually got to purchase in Dodger Stadium in a silent auction, was Reggie Jackson.

Am I going to get my warts removed? I might do, but I'm certainly not going to auction them on the Internet.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

I got [Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts] for $40 at an auction. Nobody wanted them. I have them framed in my house.

Is Amazon truly the best online buying experience? Absolutely not. Is eBay the best platform for auction? Probably not. Are dating sites like match.com really a reflection of the way people date? Probably not.

My first ball I ever got from a Big League player I actually got to purchase in Dodger Stadium in a silent auction, was Reggie Jackson.

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.

When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep.

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

With this job people want so much from you and of course I understand, but if you don't keep that back, then what have you got left? If you auction off parts of your life you are left with nothing but a bag of money and no soul.

You can auction coal blocks. All natural resources of government should be auctioned.

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction.

Publication - is the auction of the mind.

The best works do not necessarily get to auction. I like to draw, so maybe I give you a little drawing. And then eventually it ends up at auction. And then critics say, 'Oh, that's a bad drawing!' Well, I didn't say it was so wonderful.

I think what happened in the last 10 or 15 years in the art market is that all the players - and that includes artists, dealers, art advisors, everyone - basically became dealers. We've had old-school collectors morph into speculators, flipping works. We've seen auction houses buying works directly from artists or from sleazy middlemen. The last step before the crash was the artists themselves supplying the auction houses. Dealing themselves, you know? The art world is as unregulated as any financial market there is.

Auctions create greater price discovery and liquidity, resulting in a very meaningful final auction price. If you were building a securities exchange today, an auction would be a core feature.

To dissociate politicians from capitalists is slightly disingenuous, to put it mildly. U.S. lawmakers are competitive and auction themselves to the highest bidder via the lobby system.

I love collecting things from auction - we Brits really are hoarders and collectors.

An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods.

I was given all of my dad's guitars when he passed, and they were being stored at the house. My mother decided they were hers again, and she took them all back, and now they're going up for auction.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Natural resources must be so distributed, by way of auction or otherwise, that they serve a larger public purpose.

Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.

I'm a bit of a vault of secrets. I'm a victim of English reserve, which is slightly in contrast to how I communicate when I auction.

We saw farms go on the auction block while we bought food from foreign countries. Well, that's wrong.

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.

I have this beautiful antique silver wine decanter that I bought at an auction. I always pour wine from that.

It is not the time to put school districts up for auction. Now is the time to galvanize them into action.

In all fairness to the auction companies ? most companies are not car experts, they are marketers. I caution buyers to make sure that they have done their homework before they raise their hand and not after.

The designer of my Emmy gown is donating my gown to the charity for an auction.

My assistant says I'm an eBay auction waiting to happen. I have a very large collection of T-shirts... about 4,000 now. Maybe I'll pillage it someday. I have resisted the offers to do a line of T-shirts.

If you default on your Visa bill, nobody comes to repossess your refrigerator or auction off your shoes. The biggest penalty you'll face is trouble getting future credit.

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.

In April 2007 I learned that Yves Saint Laurent had a brain tumor, and he died on June 1, 2008. During those 14 months I had plenty of time to think about what would happen. There was only one solution: the auction. An auction establishes memory. That's what I want to do.

There were a lot of publishers that I loved, so the book went to auction. An auction is where you sit nervously by your phone and eat potato chips for two days waiting for your agent to text you numbers of the highest bid for each round. I ultimately went with Dervla Kelly at Rodale Books.

The lesson here, and my advice for other developers, is to find a way that you can quantify for people what your product is worth. We were leery to do it ourselves, but being near Vetro when they did, the auction was a good technique for that. No one wants to be first, and the auction proved to people that others were buying and gave them that boost of confidence they needed.

One of these days, when I get tired of it all, I'll keep six guitars and the amps I'm using, and I'll have a big old auction for charity.

Women artists, no matter how well recognized they are, are seldom given solo exhibitions or featured in significant group shows. They are never top-ranked in auction choices.

The results speak for themselves: Businesses that competitively sourced service contracts saved an average of about 22 percent. Even more impressive - nearly every e-auction delivered cost savings.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.

By the time I'm done with my show, I'm in Never-Never Land. Usually I leave the room for the auction and try to chill out.

God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.

Can you imagine a demon auction? Serial killer going once...twice...sold to the drama queen at the corner.

When you buy a company at an auction, and you are committing yourself to pay some $300 million to the state because it was a privatization deal, and you don't pay it, is it OK? Isn't it something that deserves court procedures?

We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.

I always have my lucky gavel in case I have to do an auction on short notice.

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time.

I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.