Top 100 Capitalism's Quotes
#1. As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism's traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.
Tony Judt
#2. Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.
James Surowiecki
#3. Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.
Orson Scott Card
#4. The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.
Robert Heilbroner
#5. Capitalism's surplus was enough to sate any rational autocrat.
Anonymous
#6. Whole new businesses will emerge around breakthrough products as revolutionary technologies accelerate capitalism's creative destruction of slower industries.
Robert Kiyosaki
#8. Capitalism's final victory will be that, as it destroys us, it has us all blaming each other.
Vic Grout
#9. Without a clear focus on the scandal of wage labor and original accumulation, on capitalism's awful history of possession and dispossession, both art and politics mistake images for the enemy.
Anonymous
#10. 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
#11. Michael Moore didn't have to worry that anyone would misinterpret the title of his film, 'Capitalism: A Love Story,' because in Hollywood, no one loves capitalism. That's too bad, because Hollywood is one of capitalism's greatest successes.
Alex Tabarrok
#12. The more propaganda ... conservatives spread for capitalist economics while at the same time preaching collectivism morally and philosophically , the more nails they'll drive into capitalism's coffin.
Ayn Rand
#13. Capitalism's biggest political enemies are not the firebrand trade unionists spewing vitriol against the system but the executives in pin-striped suits extolling the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action,
Raghuram Rajan
#14. Capitalism's machinery favored these capitalists as it had never favored anyone else in its history.
Michael Lewis
#15. The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.
William Pfaff
#16. I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Zygmunt Bauman
#17. I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.
Edwidge Danticat
#18. As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.
Noam Chomsky
#19. War is only a passing phase in business life ... If you want my opinion there's nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality.
J.G. Farrell
#20. What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet ...
Charles Stross
#21. Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people's stuff.
George Carlin
#22. It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.
Peter Thiel
#23. The truth is, Hillary Clinton's ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you've got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code.
Carly Fiorina
#24. This planet was a marketplace where evil tugged murderously at its chains. Its spies were everywhere. At windy corners where young girls with knowing children's faces were selling flowers and matches, on the operating tables at the hospitals, in the slums, at railway stations, under viaducts.
Paul Leppin
#25. That's the exciting part about capitalism. It's like surfing, you have to catch the wave. - Martin Peter (aka Vermin Gobsmack)
Jamie Delano
#26. I get up every morning and think, today I'm going to make a difference. Today I'm going to end capitalism. Today I'm going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I'm back to work tomorrow, and that's the only way you can do it.
Bill Ayers
#27. Capitalism does a number of things very well: it helps create an entrepreneurial spirit; it gets people motivated to come up with new ideas, and that's a good thing.
Bernie Sanders
#28. Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.
James Surowiecki
#29. The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.
Alfred Kazin
#30. But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn't the "exercise explosion" and the "new fitness revolution" have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity?
Gary Taubes
#31. There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists.
Stefan Molyneux
#32. Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
Edmund Morris
#33. There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quests for profits comes into sharp conflict with people's demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled. Pg. 10
Walter Rodney
#34. Deregulation created this epidemic of greed which according to the rules of capitalism was OK. Beyond that there was criminal behaviour. There have been no repercussions and it's hard to make your peace with.
Brad Pitt
#35. The world's biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn't have food shortages.
Rush Limbaugh
#36. [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
#37. Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!
Terence McKenna
#38. When you're young, you wonder what all these old people are droning on about, trying to impart their wisdom. It's not relevant to you because being young is such a specific thing. Thank God for that. Thank God for the young people who go out and demonstrate against rampant capitalism or whatever.
Helen Mirren
#39. Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick" "What's funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it - that's when you really have everything".
Emma Cline
#40. Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity.
Paul Ryan
#41. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the
inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston S. Churchill
#42. I'm not a Communist. I'm an American. I'm a capitalist. I mean, I'm not a very good capitalist, myself. I'm not very good at it, but it's not that I'm not for capitalism. But people who believe in things like corporate citizenship, it's idiotic. I mean, it shows you're an idiot.
Fran Lebowitz
#43. The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism .
David Harvey
#44. In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!
Paul Lafargue
#45. We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#46. He's a rich, powerful man. Rich, powerful men get away with things all the time. It's the law of capitalism. It's especially an issue when those rich, powerful men have ties to men who are richer and more powerful.
Laurelin Paige
#47. can we imagine political institutions that might regulate today's global patrimonial capitalism justly as well as efficiently?
Thomas Piketty
#48. What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.
Susan George
#49. What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
Aleksandar Hemon
#50. Let's be clear about one indisputable fact: capitalism vigorously pursued has never produced the atrocities - starvation, tyranny, and genocide - that are produced by statism vigorously pursued. Nothing remotely close.
Donald J. Boudreaux
#51. The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism - imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.
Bob Avakian
#52. Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.
Walter E. Williams
#53. It's not capitalism that's failing the U.S. but socialism.
James Cook
#54. Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
Alex Tabarrok
#55. In America, we debate everything except capitalism. If there's an institution in your society that's above criticism, you're giving it a free pass to indulge all of its weaknesses and darker tendencies.
Richard D. Wolff
#56. What is the most effective, practical way of raising the wealth of nations? What causes wealth? I have come to think that the dream of democratic socialism is inferior to the dream of democratic capitalism, and that the latter's superiority in actual practice is undeniable.
Michael Novak
#57. Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.
Karl Marx
#58. How marvelous it was to stand in a place like the Soviet Union and talk about the coming kingdom and to tell them that Communism will not win. I told them capitalism would not win either; it's the kingdom of God that is going to win.
Billy Graham
#59. I don't think the western world is questioning capitalism. Capitalism as a concept is not something that society has written off. But today, there is degree of caution around capitalism. We believe in compassionate capitalism. Growth for growth's sake can never be an end in itself.
Kumar Mangalam Birla
#60. Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
#61. If we add state capitalism to the Bush administration's success in eroding both the US Constitution and the power of Congress, we may be witnessing the final death of accountable constitutional government.
Paul Craig Roberts
#62. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.
Penn Jillette
#63. The way the credit cards were made in the '80s to be a people's form of capitalism and be able to make it so that you could get a loan that you would have been denied previous, now that's the way stocks are.
Jim Cramer
#64. Unless there is free and fair competition, there can't be healthy economic development. And what we have in Burma now is not an open-market economy that allows free and fair competition, but a form of colonialism makes a few people very, very wealthy. It's what you would crony capitalism.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#65. I learned to see myself and my role as a capitalist ... as somebody who's trying to harness, for myself and for society, the power of greed and the power of the will to acquire into something that makes the world a better place. That's the version of capitalism that we want.
Guy Spier
#67. Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.
Yann Martel
#68. Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.
Ayn Rand
#69. When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.
Calvin Trillin
#70. changing the earth's climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.
Naomi Klein
#71. Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
#72. L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.
Geoff Mulgan
#73. It's socialism that makes it bearable for us to live under capitalism.
Arnaldur Indridason
#74. Forty-five years, these people were provided for. Not with much, you understand, but there weren't beggars in the streets or homeless people. Now everyone must figure out a new way to make a living. Selling hats or popcorn or flowers or coffee, there's not much difference. They're scared.
Annie Ward
#75. I'm convinced that there's a new way to define capitalism, and that the definition should include three ingredients - that we love our work, that we are building a traditionally successful business, and that we are having some positive impact in the world, whether it's local or global.
Biz Stone
#76. It seems to me self-evident that we cannot have capitalism without capital and, very importantly, that the ultimate source of all economic capital is Nature's capital
Prince Charles
#77. The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything's on its head, it's a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction ...
Thomas Pynchon
#78. For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.
Grafton Tanner
#79. This generation - it's almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest ...
Thomas Pynchon
#80. To put it bluntly, there isn't one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore's success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.
Ha-Joon Chang
#81. Even the European critics ... They said Hostel is the smartest film they'd seen on capitalism and how it's gone too far.
Eli Roth
#82. Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.
Aleksandar Hemon
#83. When it gets into these spikes, with shortages and uproar and so forth, people go bananas, but that's capitalism.
Charlie Munger
#84. As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods.
Joseph Goebbels
#85. There's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.
Sarah Vowell
#86. Capitalism is part of our system, but it's not for the faint of heart.
Michael Douglas
#87. Cinema is capitalism in its purest form ... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard
#88. The crime of capitalism is that it forces the vast majority of the population to remain preoccupied with basic concerns of nutrition, housing, health, and skill acquisition. It leaves little time for fostering the community and creativity that humans crave
Nivedita Majumdar
#89. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#90. We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics.
P. J. O'Rourke
#91. Old McDonald had a restaurant,
E, I, E, I, O,
And in that restaurant was some beef,
E, I, E, I, O,
With a moo moo here,
And a moo moo there.
Here a moo, there a moo,
Everywhere a moo moo cholesterol filled death trap burger.
Harry Whitewolf
#92. Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo 's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at " capitalism " because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word .
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#93. I believe in capitalism. I need to make a profit, but I would like to do it with ethics, dignity, morals. It's my dream.
Brunello Cucinelli
#94. If I were a capitalist I would not give my employees health insurance with no deductible, which I do, including dental, and paid pregnancy leave. That's not called capitalism, that's called being a Christian and someone who believes in democracy, so that everyone should get a fair slice of the pie.
Michael Moore
#95. There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
Bill Gates
#96. Every day, human beings are worth less. That's the triumph of capitalism. The money gets made, and the fewer people we need to make that money ...
David Simon
#97. I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.
Fidel Castro
#98. Under capitalism, man oppresses man. But under socialism, it's the other way around.
Russ Roberts
#99. Behind the world's most difficult problems are people - groups of people who don't get along together. You can blame crime, war, drugs, greed, poverty, capitalism or the collective unconscious. The bottom line is that people cause our problems.
Zaid Hassan
#100. There's something about China and its rush to capitalism that I find confusing. At the same time, we live in an America where capitalists oppose any government interference with free markets, while in China you have a very controlled, state-planned market where economic growth is better than ours.
David Henry Hwang
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