top of page
.png){kind=small}
Capitalism Quotes
"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
44
"We can't fool ourselves that they will ever be enough to overthrow Capitalism. If we're serious about that we need to organise ourselves in our workplaces and communities, making the links with other workers internationally."
43
"It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term."
42
"I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody's got to look over the shoulder of that child."
40
"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."
40
"I don't think that capitalism should be unbridled, if by "unbridled" you mean unregulated."
37
"The New Deal's enmity for that system of free and competitive private enterprise which we call capitalism was fundamental."
36
"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden."
31
"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."
25
"What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. this is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer."
21
"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."
19
"Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights."
19
"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."
19
"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"
18
"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."
18
"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."
17
"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."
13
"Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work."
11
bottom of page