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Life & Wisdom Quote by Alvin Toffler

"Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them"

About this Quote

Toffler’s line lands because it yanks “profit” out of its glossy, investor-deck abstraction and drops it onto the factory floor. Sausages are engineered to be edible without being legible; their success depends on a consumer’s willingness not to ask too many questions. Profit, he implies, works the same way: a clean number that travels easily, detached from the messy inputs that made it possible.

The intent is not to moralize against making money so much as to expose the deliberate opacity baked into modern capitalism. “Esteemed most” is the knife twist. Admiration correlates with distance: the farther you are from the labor, the externalities, the supply-chain bargaining, the regulatory arbitrage, the layoffs, the waste, the shortcuts, the more “pure” profit looks. Knowledge complicates reverence because it restores causality. Once you see what got squeezed out - wages, time, safety, quality, communities - profit stops reading as achievement and starts reading as accounting.

Toffler’s broader context matters. As the futurist who chronicled “future shock,” he was preoccupied with systems growing too complex for ordinary citizens to track. This aphorism is a warning about asymmetry: corporations and technocrats can understand and manage the inputs; the public sees only the output, and is asked to applaud it. The sausage metaphor also hints at complicity. People like not knowing. The market rewards that preference with convenience, and the ideology of “shareholder value” supplies the applause track.

Quote Details

TopicBusiness
Source
Later attribution: Global Account Management (Peter Cheverton, 2008) modern compilationISBN: 9780749452278 · ID: QEwXt2F3GssC
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Alvin Toffler said : ' Profits , like sausages , are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them . ' He had in mind the world of financiers and investors , but he could so easily have been speaking of the majority of ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Toffler, Alvin. (2026, February 10). Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/profits-like-sausages-are-esteemed-most-by-those-63519/

Chicago Style
Toffler, Alvin. "Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them." FixQuotes. February 10, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/profits-like-sausages-are-esteemed-most-by-those-63519/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them." FixQuotes, 10 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/profits-like-sausages-are-esteemed-most-by-those-63519/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.

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Profits like sausages are most admired by the uninformed
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Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 - November 27, 2016) was a Author from USA.

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