Quotes About Capitalism

The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: "You think we're slow? Look at that guy." To shore up the snail's morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life.

To Jurgis the packers had been the equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.

When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising, responded Schliemann—the science of persuading people to buy what they do not want—he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel house of capitalist destructiveness

Just what, answered the other, would be the productive capacity of society if the present resources of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining; but we may be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to minds inured to the ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After

What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat.

He didn't believe in the system of monopoly capitalism any more than Lanny did, and he didn't care if his system of relief by public spending brought the profiteers nearer to their doom. He had been quoted as saying about the program of the New Deal: "We shall spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.

The world had always done its utmost to spoil Lanny Budd, and his conscience gave him no rest about it; the more luxury he enjoyed, the more he hated the system of exploitation on which that luxury was based.

That was one of Monck's troubles; the other was at the opposite end of the social scale—the Communists. They were making all the difficulties they could for Socialists, as well as for Americans; they wanted everything to fail, not merely with capitalism, but also with Social Democracy, in order that the workers might be driven to Communism.

Capitalist governments talk about liberty but what they mean is property. If they have to choose between a Nazi and a Red, they are for the Nazi ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

The Fascist groups were becoming more and more active, and were resorting to gangsterism, as in all the countries bordering on Italy and Germany. They were provided with funds not only from French capitalist sources, but also from abroad.

a sort of Frankenstein creation known as "the economic man," and a deity known as "laissez faire," which meant in cruder language "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

They had the same saying as Americans: "Les affaires sont les affaires"—business is business. When you said that, you set moral considerations aside as irrelevant; the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God were idle dreams; liberty, equality, and fraternity were bait to catch votes; the only question was, did you have the price?

National Socialism was power without conscience; you might call it the culmination of capitalism, or a degenerate form of Bolshevism—names didn't matter, so long as you understood that it was counter-revolution.

In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist—and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence—is regrettable but nevertheless conceded.

How is it illegal to ask for better wages?" Natalia lit up another cigarette. "It isn't, technically. But this is a capitalist country, run by big-money interests. After the state's anti-immigration campaign, when they rounded up all the illegals and deported them back to Mexico, the growers would have had a real problem, but then . . .

Une société qui se serait emparé de toute la richesse sociale et qui aura hautement proclamée que "tous" ont droit à cette richesse, - quelle que fut la part qu'ils eussent prises antérieurement à la créer, - sera forcée d'abandonner toute idée de salariat, soit en monnaie, soit en bons de travail.

MIT economist David Autor has written, "but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution

In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.

Starting in the 1970s, the Friedman Doctrine and its extrapolations freed and encouraged businesspeople and the rich to go ahead and conform to the left-wing caricatures of them, to be rapacious and amoral without shame.

THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God's glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God's glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.

Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one? (Three Penny Opera)