quotations about capitalism
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty--of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
SUSAN SONTAG
Aids and Its Metaphors
The forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU
New York Times Magazine, Sept. 7, 1958
What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart.
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
Loyalties
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.
ALAN GREENSPAN
The Assault on Integrity
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer.
KARL MARK
Capital
Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other right.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
speech to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861
The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all.
MAX WEBER
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Language and Freedom
The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Wheels of Commerce
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
AYN RAND
Capitalism: The Unknown Deal
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
HOWARD ZINN
A People's History of the United States
In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of "freedom," like a bastard brother of reform.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Art of Being Ruled
Capital is money, capital is commodities.... By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
KARL MARX
Capital
The brilliant creative core of capitalism ... is the story the entrepreneurs and capital investors tell themselves about the future. How they intend to alter it, what they expect to gain in return, where they will raise the capital to accomplish their vision. Many of their stories turn out to be flawed or mistaken, of course, but the capacity to envision a set of future events and then act to fulfill them is a central source of capitalism's strength and its dominance of society.
WILLIAM GREIDER
The Soul of Capitalism
What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
R. D. LAING
introduction, The Politics of Experience
Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things. He gave it a chance. He even provided a first instalment of funds. Can you beat that? It's so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
I understand that you have an economic system in America known as Capitalism. Through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous, but Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your Capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your profession by the index of your salary and the size of the wheel base on your automobile, rather than the quality of your service to humanity.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Nov. 4, 1956
The things you own end up owning you.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club