Quotes from David Graeber

When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology18 – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.

Often, the only polite thing to do if one has accomplished something significant is to instead make fun of oneself.

When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking "three paternosters," or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

I would myself argue that nowadays, at least, it is impossible to say it is just one thing, rather, art has become a field for play and experiment with the very idea of value – but all pretty much agree that, were an artist to be seen as simply in it for the money, his work would be worth less of it.

Moral envy is an undertheorized phenomenon.

Let us emphasize (we really shouldn't have to) that Rousseau's effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and lost ages of freedom and equality were in no sense themselves responsible for the French Revolution.

Modern states are democratic, or at least it's generally felt they really should be. yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.

The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.

We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire. Insofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous substance. But even more: increasingly, they did not just want money. They needed it. This was a profound change.

Bir "devlet" dairesinde fiilen görevli memurlar gurubu, gerekli maddi gereçler ve dosyalarla birlikte "daireyi" oluÅŸturur. Özel giriÅŸimde "daire" genellikle "ofis" diye adland?r?l?r.

What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in 'Western civilization,' only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.27

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Temples were established, and with them new sorts of clothing, new dairy products, wines and woollens were disseminated to local populations. While these products might not have been entirely novel, what the temples introduced was the principle of standardization: urban temple-factories were literally outputting products in uniform packages, with the houses of the gods guaranteeing purity and quality control.

If money is a just a yardstick, what then does it measure? The answer was simple: debt.

There's a reason why, in English, the words 'politics' 'polite' and 'police' all sound the same – they're all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us 'civility,' 'civic' and a certain modern understanding of 'civilization'.

yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it

Once, while serving time in exile at a Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky developed the theory that the worst torture one could possibly devise would be to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task. Even

makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche's initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane.

As a general principle, when an enemy's army comes, it seeks some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death instead, they will consider running away the most profitable thing to do. When all one's enemies consider running to be the most profitable thing to do, no blades will cross. This is the most essential point in military matters.57

When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves—or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended.

Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.

the actual functions of chiefly office are to (1) mediate quarrels, (2) provide for the needy, and (3) to entertain with beautiful speeches)

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Incearingly, it's looking like we have no other choice.