Popular quotes about Capitalism! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 14
I think the thing about capitalism is it's an evil necessity, capitalism. Communism has been tried and failed, and socialism, that doesn't work very well. Capitalism works, but the problem about capitalism is it does mean that a few individuals become very wealthy. Therefore, I think those individuals have enormous responsibility to redistribute that wealth either by creating new businesses or creating new jobs and making sure that money just doesn't lie in a bank account for future generations.
Richard BransonBear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.
Noam ChomskyAnarchism is opposed to states, armies, slavery, the wages system, the landlord system, prisons, monopoly capitalism, oligopoly capitalism, state capitalism, bureaucracy, meritocracy, theocracy, revolutionary governments, patriarchy, matriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, protection rackets, intimidation by gangsters, and every other kind of coercive institution. In other words, anarchism opposes government in all its forms.
Donald RooumCapitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
Camille PagliaCapitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns into capitalism. It is an incredibly defeatist attitude. If you choose to look at reality that way, I suppose you can, but you have to do enormous violence to reality to do so consistently.
David GraeberI was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.
Sidney HookCapitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.
Ludwig von MisesI think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
Michael PollanI don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism.
Tom HodgkinsonCapitalismโs real โgrave-diggersโ may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises-War and Shopping-simply will not work.
Arundhati RoyThere cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre.
Amadeo BordigaA system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.
Ron PaulIt is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.
Immanuel WallersteinLets embrace productive capitalism, not casino capitalism, by restoring transparency and true competition in the commodities markets.
Maria CantwellI do think that at this moment in late capitalism it is easier in our minds to imagine raising Florida 30 feet to escape the rising seas than it is to regulate capitalism to make it serve human beings.
Naomi KleinTo paraphrase Karl Marx, the great Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the streets of Copenhagen...Capitalism is the specter, almost nobody wants to mention it...Socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke about, which walks here too, rather it is like a counter-specter. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don't have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world.
Hugo ChavezIf you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.
Ayn RandThe main argument is that capitalism is constituted by a varied of different practices, and so challenging capitalism needs to be about a variety of struggles. I draw on the important work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, who argues that we should model anti-capitalist struggle on feminist struggles.
Cynthia KauffmanCapitalism is a system that's ultimately predicated on and depends on some form of inequality. Feminism has always intersected with capitalism in terms of women's labor and gendered divisions of labor.
Andi ZeislerWhen I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in America for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families. And I don't think we should confuse what we have to do every so often in America, which is save capitalism from itself.
Hillary ClintonWhile I haven't read economist Robin Hahnel's work, replacing capitalism would be at the very bottom of my list of priorities - to be considered only after everything else had been tried. Improving our capitalistic system however, is at the top of my list and is of course the major theme of "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism."
John C. BogleCapitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.
Ayn RandFor over a century, popular struggles in the democracies have used the nation-state to temper raw capitalism. The power of voters has offset the power of capital. But as national barriers have come down in the name of freer commerce, so has the capacity of governments to manage capitalism in a broad public interest. So the real issue is not "trade" but democratic governance.
Robert KuttnerInside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!
Terence McKennaSonic the hedgehog is a beautiful statement on capitalism. You spend your whole life collecting yellow rings and then hit one spike and lose them all. And there is a fat man who wants to kill you.
Thom YorkeTo have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
Wendell BerryA sane person would think that Wal-Mart would never carry 'Capitalism: A Love Story' because it's simply not in their best interests to inform their customers of their shady past.
Michael MooreThe more moral the people are in their business dealings, the less paperwork you need, the more handshakes you can have, the more the wheels of capitalism work better because there's trust in the marketplace. Business ethics is not a joke. And, in fact, I think most businesses that I've dealt with encourage exactly that type of behavior.
Rick SantorumCapitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.
Joan RobinsonIdentity is marketed in national capitalism as a property. It is something you can purchase, or purchase a relation to. Or it is something you already own that you can express: my masculinity, my queerness . But identity need not be simply a caption for an image of an unchangeable concrete self. It is also a theory of the future, of history.
Lauren BerlantIt is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
Christopher LaschThe genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy.
Lewis H. LaphamIn 2003, Helmut Schmidt said: Predatory capitalism exists, we have to civilize it and we can do that via Europe. He was right. We haven't tried hard enough.
Martin SchulzIf there is one thing all Fascists and National Socialists agreed on, it was their hostility to capitalism.
Eugen WeberWe had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.
Noam ChomskySociety is made up of groups, and as long as the smaller groups do not have the same rights and the same protection as others - I don['t care whether you call it capitalism or communism -it is not going to work. Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counterpower, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come.
Cesar ChavezIn the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.
Katherine LosseCapitalism does what it does and money doesn't belong to anybody. It just stays in someone's wallet for a while, then it goes somewhere else. It always goes somewhere and it is always about to go somewhere.
Henry RollinsOne of the greatest gains of capitalism is that even the proletarian slave feels like a master. He believes he has the power to change his life. We are propelled by the ideology of the self-made man: we work more, we consume more and in the end we consume ourselves. The consequences are burnout, bulimia and other lifestyle diseases.
Renata SaleclThis crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future.
Albert EinsteinCapitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.
David KortenThe underlying issue is the system of capitalism itself, and under this system the best means for regulating or checking their power is not relying on a government which represents the interests of the rich but for millions of working people to become politically active in workplaces and communities through building unions and our own political party.
Kshama SawantI think on the efficiency level, not only the distribution level, capitalism is a flawed system. It probably has the same virtues as Churchill attributed to democracy: It's the worst system except for any other. And I think that's right, but it cannot be thought that some unmitigated belief in free markets is a cure even from the efficiency point of view.
Kenneth ArrowMaybe it's the Calvinist guilt about capitalism or mercantilism. But, I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even. It's funny though, because a lot of my unreliable tours were inspired by the docents at the Japan Society, who are mostly these volunteers from the Upper East Side. They basically find positive messages in really nihilist, perverse videos. So they were my inspiration.
MomusI talked a lot early on in my career about intersectionality and how racism and classism and sexism and homophobia and capitalism are all connected with each other, and they're these crazy systems that are feeding on each other and are also damaging. I can't even go into the whole spectrum of it. But I feel like kids today are so much more savvy about that conversation. And I'm so thrilled when I get to meet younger people who are doing that so much better than I did.
Kathleen Hanna