[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

Even in the most market-obsessed society, we're still spending half of our time on something other than just getting cash.

The fascinating thing about standard economic stories is exactly that: they assume that everybody wants that kind of closure. That all human relations are forms of exchange, because if everything is an exchange then it's true that we're both equals. We walk up, I give you something, you give me something, and we walk away. Or I give you something, you don't give me something right now, and you owe me. So if we have any ongoing relationships at all, it's because somebody is in debt.

Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.

Adam Smith actually took all his best ideas and lines from sources from medieval Persia. But one thing he doesn't take is the underlying assumption they have that the basis of a market is mutual aid.

Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.