Quotes About Capital

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.

Labor is superior to capital and precedes capital. Without labor, there is no capital.

We can ill afford to have activities conducted as "non-profit," that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

The only source of the generation of additional capital goods is saving. If all the goods produced are consumed, no new capital comes into being.

Rather than providing him with economic opportunity, the Act of that name seems designed to make the poor man do penance all his life for the sin of being born into a non-capital-owning family... One searches it in vain for measure designed to provide economic opportunity to the capital owner. But nobody proposes to educate, train, or rehabilitate either him or his children, even when their "unemployment" is notorious.

When you talk about taxing the rich, you're taxing capital, and taxing capital results in damage to more than just the wealthy.

There can be no freedom of the individual, no democracy, without the capital system, the profit system, the private enterprise system. These are, in the end, inseparable. Those who would destroy freedom have only first to destroy the hope of gain, the profit of enterprise and risk-taking, the hope of accumulating capital, the hope to save something for one's old age and for one's children. For a community of men without property, and without the hope of getting it by honest effort, is a community of slaves of a despotic State.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.

Only by providing leading-edge human capital and knowledge capital can American continue to maintain a high standard of living, including providing national security for its citizens.

Am I a capitalist? No. Why would I be a capitalist? I have no capital. Most people have no capital. But to punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We're responsible for changing it, yes. But we can't actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.

What does reflect reality very well is complexity theory, which comes from physics. I'm the one pioneering the idea of bringing it to capital markets. When you look at capital markets through the lens of complexity theory, you ask "what's the scale of the system?" Scale is a fancy word for size. What measures are you using? If you look at total debt, the concentration of assets in the five largest banks, what percentage of the total assets of the five largest banks are interconnected? What you see is a very densely connected, fragile system that could collapse at any moment.

It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect.

There's a lot of really wonderful things about the United States of America, especially its ethnic diversity and its mostly successful struggle to create a democracy out of many different cultures. So, we have a lot of capital as a people, we have a lot of cultural capital to keep our democracy going.

People are enduring more than a temporary financial crisis. We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the economy. Companies and industries will in great measure no longer grow by borrowing vast capital to make huge acquisitions. The way to grow to critical mass - the Google way - will be to become platforms and networks that enable others to build businesses, grow, and succeed.

An oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society because under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information.

A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.

The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization.

The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.

Capital in money form has no citizenship. It is fungible, an asset capable of moving from place to place in a nanosecond.

If we functionally define a capitalist household as one that receives at least half of the annual income it spends on consumption in the form of return on invested capital, less than 1 percent of United States households are capitalists.

I'd always had a childhood ambition to go into the investment capital business, and spent twenty-odd years in it. But the thought of spending the second half of my career in the same business was boring, so I looked around for other opportunities .

Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Network marketing is the big wave of the future. It's taking the place of franchising, which now requires too much capital for the average person.

The seeming antagonism between capital and labor is the result of deceptive appearance.

The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...

What you see happening right now with some of the consolidation is all about more spectrum and capital formation that give you the scale, scope and resources to invest in that 3G world.

I support the death penalty because I believe, if administered swiftly and justly, capital punishment is a deterrent against future violence and will save other innocent lives.

Capital exploits the labour of a few to multiply itself.

Israel must withdraw from Jerusalem so that it becomes the capital of a state of Palestine.

There can be no greater error then in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.

The little dog-eared books in the meeting-house proved poor reading ... So many of them were about unnaturally good children who never did wrong, and unnaturally bad children who never did right. At the end there was always the word MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across the path for them to stumble over.

In my early days, fashion was considered a very high risk industry. The failure rate is very high. Trying to get capital and trying to find people who specialize in that industry is very difficult too.

We need a president that is sitting down, getting Americans to work, getting this economy going. That is the single most important thing that the president of the United States does, is create a climate where job creators know that they're going to be able to risk their capital and have a chance to have a return on the investment. And it's never too late to start that.

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.

For a guy that grew up on 31st Street and Everroad Park West and played on Haw Creek and dreamed some day of serving in Washington D.C., from my boyhood, to have the opportunity to have represented my hometown in our nation's capital, and now to have the opportunity to serve the entire nation as vice president is ... it's just deeply humbling.

In an inflationary world, a toll bridge (like company) would be a great thing to own because you've laid out the capital costs. You built it in old dollars and you don't have to keep replacing it.

Our mother was killed for something she did not do. She was taken away from us. That's as personal as it can get. But, the fact that the government facilitated the invention of evidence in order to convict someone of a capital crime, that is something that should concern everybody.

Capital has its proper place and is entitled to every protection. The wages of men should be recognized in the structure of and in the social order as more important than the wages of money [interest].

I like the little bit of distance that London affords me and I like living in a world capital. I like having the culture at my fingertips.

I have now come to the conclusion (roughly) that capital punishment is defensible, if it can be shown to have a deterrent effect on murder. In that case, a few executions save not only some people from being murdered but also some people from becoming murders.

Desire is always followed by boredom. And only love can defeat boredom. Love with a capital L; we all dream of it.

It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.