Capitalism Quotes

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

~ Adam Johnson

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism—and of American life? On a day that I don’t spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It’s my main form of social interaction—as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.

~ Karan Mahajan

If an eagle be imprisonedon the back of a coin,and the coin tossedinto the sky,the coin will spin,the coin will flutter,but the eagle will never fly.

~ Henry Dumas

She looked at her note cards and took a breath. Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald's. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France, where the Government isn't privatized, they still have to pay tax and do whatever the Government says, which would really suck. In USA countries, we respect individual rights and let people do whatever they want.

~ Max Barry

The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth--life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill.

~ Bill Ripley

...I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane, and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser much be in a frankly hopeless condition.

~ H.g. Wells

Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

~ Howard Scott

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and robbery.

~ Emma Goldman

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

~ Ayn Rand

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.

~ Edmund Morris

They understood what had really held the market together before. Violence. After all, what good was a debt if the creditor couldn't compel it to be paid?

~ Alex London

The use of market values and technology as a social barometer has devalued the worth of individuals, rendered irrelevant the quality of their lives, and stunted their creativity.

~ Sulak Sivaraksa

The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.

~ Amadeo Bordiga

If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.

~ Jerry Mander

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.

~ Luc Ferry

Those who find it hypocritical of others to use, say, a smartphone, to speak ill of capitalism, needs to be reminded that capitalism is an ideology, not a technology.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When multi-national corporations are given the same powers as feudal states or nations: expect wars.

~ Norman Hartley

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all education, enlightenment and human progress consists.

~ Napoleon Hill

Corruption ultimately guilts the corrupt, and it hardens the innocent who suffer as a result of it. It isn't the young who corrupt the old, rather it's the inverse.The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufactures, inshort, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.

~ Adam Smith

What is this so-called 'employment flexibility'? It simply means that employers, in their quest to reduce costs whilst trying to meet the demands of globalisation, are disregarding the traditional job boundaries – often to the detriment of the unskilled, non-standard worker. Employers use non-standard workers to avoid restrictive labour laws and collective bargaining restraints. In addition, the practice provides them with more flexibility.

~ E.s. Fourie

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

~ Noam Chomsky

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

~ Tariq Ali

[C]apitalism--democracy's sidekick

~ Laura Kelly

As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.

~ Michael Parenti

One cannot equate capitalism and democracy.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Money has replaced the vote.

~ Chris Hedges

As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.

~ Andreas Laurencius

[A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.

~ Noam Chomsky

In the United States […] the two main business-dominated parties, with the support of the corporate community, have refused to reform laws that make it virtually impossible to create new political parties (that might appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competitions and free choice have little meaning. In some respects the caliber of debate and choice in neoliberal elections tends to be closer to that of the one-party communist state than that of a genuine democracy.

~ Robert W. Mcchesney

You can't have capitalism without racism.

~ Malcolm X

No genuine revolutionary challenge to either the State or Capitalism in the United States can fail to ignore racism's importance in maintaining the current system.

~ Curious George Brigade

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

~ Elizabeth Warren

The real American ideal of cool which is building businesses, protecting freedom at home and abroad, taking responsibility for your actions, and leaving other people alone to live as they damn well please.

~ Greg Gutfeld