We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.

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.

[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.

If your father is an air-conditioner repairman from Nebraska, its conceivable that you might become a CEO, but you can't imagine being the drama critic for the New York Times. So if you come from a background like that and you want to actually have a career which involves doing something noble in the world, what can you do? You can join the army. That's about it. Or you can work for the church. That explains a lot of the focus of right-wing populism. The right wing figured that out, that people want enough to survive and to do good.

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt.