Quotes About Capitalism

Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.

I think a lot of self-identity and inner-personal development is hampered by consumerism and capitalism because we see ourselves as a reflection of the TV, rather than as a reflection of the people who are around us, truly.

The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.

I don't know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits - ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit.

You see, we capitalists will never actually ask you to work overtime. I don't even track your hours. I just make it clear that I trust you to get your job done in the time allotted. And then I hand you twice as much work as you can reasonably do in a 40-hour week.

We have broken the shackles of conservative socialism. The growing middle classes want the kind of standard of living you enjoy in the West. So what I'm selling is a lifestyle.

I'm a big believer in free enterprise. If people want to try it, then go for it.

Profits are part of the mechanism by which society decides what it wants to see produced.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial.

For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the Cold War, is that the engine of capitalism - the individual - is mightier than any collective.

The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war.

Well, the common enemy in North America is the Western consumer. The consumer has driven oil up to $50 a barrel so we have to have these wars. I think it's incumbent upon us to.

Capitalism in its imperialistic stage is a system which regards war as a legitimate method for solution of international disputes - a method which is legitimate in fact if not legally so.

Capitalism is war; socialism is peace.

It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.

I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system.

The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?

Sexual creativity is a mystery that will never be solved by commercialism.

war capitalism also nourished the emerging secondary sectors of the economy such as insurance, finance, and shipping, sectors that would become exceedingly important to the emergence of the British cotton industry, but also public institutions such as government credit, money itself, and national defense.