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"We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations."
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"You know you are capitalism's ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom."

"Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."

"The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language."

"The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society."

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

"We've each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men's profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that."

"I think commercialism helps Christmas and I think that the more capitalism we can inject into the Christmas holiday the more spiritual I feel about it"

"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden."

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

"Capitalism: let live who can afford to, not simply who wishes to. Life has a price and it belongs only to those who can pay it."
Explore more quotes by Jose Saramago

"In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays."

"It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power."

"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."

"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."

"Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up."

"The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan."

"Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?"

"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."

"People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich."

"I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends."
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