Best 955 quotes in «capitalism quotes» category

Abraham Lincoln described America as a 'nation conceived in Liberty' and our capitalist system is a consequence of that devotion to liberty: we are not free in order to engage in trade, rather we engage in trade because we are free to do so.

According to the economic story, you're free to enter and exit the world of markets as you please. As a buyer, you're free to choose whether to buy something or not. If you want something and can afford to pay for it, it's yours. If nothing pleases you, you can "vote with your dollar" and buy nothing. In practice, if you're less mobile than others in the world of markets somehow, perhaps because you're a child or a senior, or are poor, or have learning disabilities or mental health issues, you don't have the same access to the market as others do who are more independent Instead, you'll likely find it hard to identify your choices and make the best choice, which you need to be able to do for the market to operate efficiently, or you may not have enough money to enter the market to begin with. Sometimes your "best choice" isn't much of a choice at all; if your two options are to starve or to buy bread at extortion rates from the only seller in town, your "freedom" to enter or exit the market doesn't amount to much.

A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies.

A country cannot afford to ignore its poor and disadvantaged. Common humanity means that we should not.

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as it's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas.

Advertising expresses a power relationship . . . One person, the advertiser, invades; millions absorb. And to what end? So that people will buy something! A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose.

Advertising makes it possible for a company to make it our problem that it makes a product that solves a problem we do not and will never have.

After the industrial revolution in Europe when the masses were plunged into poverty, Europeans set out to ‘discover’ the world seeking greener pastures. They plundered Africa and Asia and exported the valuable resources of these continents. The civilized and gentle folks of Africa and Asia were unlike the Vikings and Cavemen of Europe.. They treated the European invasion as a temporary set back ae we do with thieves, robbers and criminals of today. However, with the power of their ammunition and weapons the Europeans divided the world into artificial areas, and conquered humanity. We are still brain-washed by their values under the guise of ‘Capitalism” – ie: new-colonialism. After 60+ years of independence, two generations of Africans and Asians still believe that they MUST copy and follow the lifestyle of these European settlers around the world. So neo- colonialism and capitalism thrive. There’s no end to the ‘dependence’ of Africa and some Asian countries on their past colonisers.. Brain-washed, they continue to be cow-towed by the economical and political campaigns of the west. SET Yourselves FREE and live FREE as your ancestors did 500 years ago! Work on your land and produce all your needs is the philosophy of Gandhii which encouraged Indians to gain freedom in 1947. Do not let squanderers and greedy wanderers PLUNDER the rich resources of your land including humans; be vigilant and join forces with trustworthy others to combat greed and capitalism. China is the leading country in the world today as she was at one time, because her citizens worked hard -- toiling their land and adopting innovative ways to mass produce and export goods at low cost. China’s people were willing to sacrifice themselves for their long-term future. Kudos to China!! She is vigilant in protecting her interests from her enemies.

Again, a Prince should show himself a patron of merit, and should honour those who excel in every art. He ought accordingly to encourage his subjects by enabling them to pursue their callings, whether mercantile, agricultural, or any other, in security, so that this man shall not be deterred from beautifying his possessions from the apprehension that they may be taken from him, or that other refrain from opening a trade through fear of taxes; and he should provide rewards for those who desire so to employ themselves, and for all who are disposed in any way to add to the greatness of his City or State.

Again in combination with the schools, the nation's media reflect the character of society impressed by the displays of power and opulence rather than the play of mind. The ancient Greeks admired in their art what they called the glittering play of "windswift thought." Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or statues collected in Athens, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen--self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, loyal, skeptical, marked "by refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.

A highway, a bridge, a navigable canal, for example, may in most cases be both made and maintained by a small toll upon the carriages which make use of them: a harbour, by moderate port-duty upon the tonnage of the shipping which load or unload in it. The coinage, another institution for facilitating commerce, in many countries, not only defrays its own expense, but affords a small revenue or seignorage to the sovereign. The post-office, another institution for the same purpose, over and above defraying its own expense, affords in almost all countries a very considerable revenue to the sovereign. When the carriages which pass over a highway or a bridge, and the lighters which sail upon a navigable canal, pay toll in proportion to their weight or their tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarce possible to invent a more equitable way of maintaining such works.

Ahora bien, esos tipos, los hippies, sí que eran gorrones. Siempre pidiendo dinero, o robándolo, fomentando el libre esto y el libre lo otro, hablando por los codos del anticapitalismo que sólo habían hecho posible los padres trabajadores a los que esquilmaban.

A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them – or sold at a high cost.

All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations - at our expense? Their "naturally superior talents" include unprincipled and illegal subterfuge such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider training, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforcement of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful products and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the corporate business system.

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

American corporate capitalism is a murder-suicide mission.

America runs on credit darling. Why do you worry, our credit will take care of this payment. It is not saving or cash in hand that matters. We do not need cash, we just need potential. The system in the US believes in potential. That is the model of the future. You need not be born rich, but you should be in the league that can make it big.

Americans like to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like. And then they wonder why they're not happy.

Americans think New Yorkers are property obsessed, but clearly they haven’t lived a day in Hong Kong. In this part of the world, a man isn’t a man until he is a homeowner. His entire life leads up to the singular moment when he hands over the down-payment check and puts his signature on the triplicate purchase agreement. All the good grades and job promotions he has received are mere preparation; and every source of happiness - marriage, children and retirement - depends on it.

Actions that exemplify the limitations of a singular devotion to the profit motive, also draw a troublesome distinction between what is legal and what is moral.

All revolutions are declared to be natural and inevitable, once they are successful, and capitalism, as the type of economic system prevailing in Western Europe and America, is clothed today with the unquestioned respectability of the triumphant fact. [from foreword]

All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.

...all this abstraction is also potentially distancing. We don't see the labor that went into building our railroads or the civilizations that were wiped out in order to clear the land. We don't see the millennia of dinosaurs or plankton that went into our oil, the Chinese repetitive stress injuries that went into our iPhones, or any of the other time-intensive processes we can spend in an instant today. We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders" of the previous generation.

Although 77 percent of US companies do offer paid vacations and holidays, a quarter of Americans get none at all. The typical worker gets just ten days per year, along with six public holidays - and this only after being employed by the same company for at least a year.

And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they're in and whatever floor they're on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they'll agree that there's a greenhouse effect and we'd better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they're going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It's just that the next thing they'll ask is, "So how can we make some money off it?" In fact, anybody in business who didn't ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that's the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said," I'm not going to look at it that way, I'm going to do things differently," well, they'd get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it―because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don't like them, and I don't, then you're going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way.

And when they spy on us let them discover us loving

And with the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries in recent years, it's getting worse, not better. As capital becomes more fluid and it becomes easier for corporations to move production to the Third World, why should they pay higher wages in Detroit when they can pay lower wages in Northern Mexico or the Philippines? And the result is, there's even more pressure on the poorer part of the population here. And what's in effect happened is they've been closed off into inner-city slums―where then all sorts of other pressures begin to attack them: drugs, gentrification, police repression, cutbacks in limited welfare programs, and so on. And all of these things contribute to creating a very authentic sense of hopelessness, and also to real anti-social behavior: crime.

And in those same years, the farmers in the developing world would come to be encouraged to use the patented descendants of the seeds their ancestors had once freely shared. And once they did that, once they bought the new seed and stopped saving seed as they had for centuries, they not only lost the old varieties but they were trapped in a system that indentured them to the seed companies. And if they resisted buying the new seeds, even if they resisted because they were not convinced about the safety of the new seeds, they were told they were causing starvation in their countries. And if they thought to demand royalties for the germplasm their ancestors once had given freely, they were called greedy.

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside. Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.

Antagonism between the classes will be removed. I do not envisage a dead and artificial level among the people. There will be a variety among them as there is among the leaves of a tree. There will certainly be no have-nots, no unemployment, and no disparity between classes and masses such as we see to-day. I have no doubt whatsoever that if non-violence in its full measure becomes the policy of the State, we shall reach essential equality without strife.

An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices.

Anti-Americanism is now the mother's milk of the American educational system. Many schools in the United States teach that capitalism is exploitative and American foreign policy is imperialistic. Patriotism isn't taught in American schools. This needs to be understood. The sins of America's past are emphasized while the country's virtues are eclipsed. The achievements of capitalism are denied by environmentalists, socialists and anarchists whose voices have poisoned the well of higher education to the bargain. The older generation has been asleep at the switch, not looking too closely at what their children have been taught. And now the damage is far advanced, and the country's bureaucracies are packed and crowded with people who haven't a clue. Oddly, the United States is undermined by a national psychology that tolerates sedition and treason as if these were legitimate forms of dissent.

Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

Anyone who pretends to "understand" Latin America is a fool.

Any system based on competition will inherently promote inequality, division, and conflict.

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed. Simply put, it lacks values, and such a system will eventually collapse once its true light is discovered by the masses. Though some say that capitalism is a modern system, corruption has been the source for the demise of every great civilization.

A peasant who has harvested twenty sacks of wheat, which he with his family proposes to consume, deems himself twice as rich as if he had harvested only ten; likewise a housewife who has spun fifty yards of linen believes that she is twice as rich as if she had spun but twentyfive. Relatively to the household, both are right; looked at in their external relations, they may be utterly mistaken. If the crop of wheat is double throughout the whole country, twenty sacks will sell for less than ten would have sold for if it had been but half as great; so, under similar circumstances, fifty yards of linen will be worth less than twenty-five: so that value decreases as the production of utility increases, and a producer may arrive at poverty by continually enriching himself. And this seems unalterable, inasmuch as there is no way of escape except all the products of industry become infinite in quantity, like air and light, which is absurd. God of my reason! Jean Jacques would have said: it is not the economists who are irrational; it is political economy itself which is false to its definitions. Mentita est iniquitas sibi.

Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.

Any human being should be capable of three things to earn such title: live alone, hunt and drive anything with or without wheels. If you don't have these three things, you're either a slave or an animal. Any idea about being social or human has been cleverly associated with these two things, in order to make believe that being a social animal is the ideal to aspire for, especially if such animal is enslaved by a certain amount of ideals promoted by the system that gives him life and cuts it off as soon as he shows himself undeserving.

As minhas primeiras emoções tinham sido a melancolia mais pura e a compaixão mais sincera, mas na mesma proporção em que o desamparo de Bartleby crescia na minha fantasia, aquela melancolia se transformava em medo, e a compaixão, em repulsa. É tão verdadeiro e ao mesmo tempo tão terrivel o fato de que, ao vermos ou presenciarmos a miséria, os nossos melhores sentimentos são despertados até um cer to ponto; mas, em certos casos especiais, não passam disso. Erram os que afirmam que é devido apenas ao egoísmo inerente ao coração humano. Na verdade, provém de uma certa impotência em remediar um mal excessivo e orgânico. Para uma pessoa sensivel, a piedade é quase sempre uma dor. Quando afinal percebe que tal piedade não significa um socorro eficaz, o bom senso compele a alma a desvencilhar-se dela. O que vi naquela manhã convenceu-me de que o escrivão era vítima de um mal inato e incurável. Eu podia dar esmolas ao seu corpo, mas o seu corpo não lhe doía; era a sua alma que sofria, e ela estava fora do meu alcance.

A society that bases its well-being on consumption, on the gain and accumulation of money is a sick and wrong society.

A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit-oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be prepared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life.

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate.

A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion.

A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high values to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for ‘the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.

Arguing that the only problem with a free market is lack of competition, is like arguing that that the only problem with prostitution is that there aren't enough pimps.

Art has been around for a really long time. Music has been around for a really long time. Painting and sculpture and plays have been around for a really long time. But it's only in the last fifty years that there's been an industry . . . that's new . . . It used to be, you didn't become an artist to become rich, you became an artist because you had an idea to share, cause you had an emotion to share.

As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.

As Christendom suffers attack upon attack, indignity upon indignity, defeat after defeat, a new religion moves in to take its place. This great and rising sect of our time, which is socialism, has three major objectives as outlined by Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. First, socialism wants to destroy capitalism (i.e., in terms of private property in the sense of business ownership); second, socialism wants to destroy the family; and third, socialism wants to destroy the nation state. As Bukovsky pointed out, the socialists failed to destroy the idea of private property, but they have partly succeeded against the family and the nation state. The breakdown of the family is all too real for anyone to deny, and this breakdown spells disaster for a society that is too weak to resist.