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"The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way."
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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."
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Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The New Deal's enmity for that system of free and competitive private enterprise which we call capitalism was fundamental."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."
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Personal Development
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"People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking."
People
"If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal."
Goal
"I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place."
Life
"There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive."
Work
"The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part."
Idea
"Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria."
Danger
"Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn."
History
"Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can."
God
"Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult."
People
"The reason that a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness."
Reason
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