Top 84 Capitalist Society Quotes
#1. But business in a crony-capitalist society is the craft of sharks.
Pierce Brown
#2. Because capitalist society has expanded the productive forces so enormously, the social conditions under which it arose lag behind and become fetters holding back the further growth of productive forces.
Earl Browder
#3. Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.
John Fowles
#4. We do not have to get rid of consumer-capitalist society before we can begin to build the new way. The way to replace the old system is to ignore it to death.
Ted Trainer
#5. In a capitalist society one can hold on to one's fortune only if one perpetually acquires it anew by investing it wisely.
Ludwig Von Mises
#6. In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.
Karl Marx
#7. Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
Alice Walker
#8. The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions.
Hilaire Belloc
#9. We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.
Cornel West
#10. This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.
Grace Lee Boggs
#11. I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution.
Cornel West
#12. Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich
that is the democracy of capitalist society.
Vladimir Lenin
#13. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.
George Orwell
#14. Given the fact that we are in a capitalist society, we still do not want to overlook not only what a corporation produces and its profitability but also how it impacts the environment, touches human life and whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person.
Dean Smith
#15. Fear of repeating oneself, of repeating oneself may be the greatest bugaboo of late capitalist society. The fear has been marketed so effectively that a will to sustain attention on any one thing can be cancelled out easily in favour of the latest distraction.
Jan Peacock
#16. The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
Milton Friedman
#17. When we call a capitalist society a consumers' democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers' ballot, held daily in the market-place.
Ludwig Von Mises
#18. If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.
Peter Drucker
#19. In a capitalist society, persons who create capital, like Michael Eisner, are given the staggering rewards.
Carroll O'Connor
#20. In a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it.
Sally Wentworth
#21. It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
Mary McCarthy
#22. Surely, nothing can be more plain or even more trite common sense than the proposition that innovation [ ... ] is at the center of practically all the phenomena, difficulties, and problems of economic life in capitalist society.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#23. In a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.
Toni Cade Bambara
#24. Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.
Bernard Werber
#25. Prison, with its daily rhythm, with the transfer and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society.
Antonio Negri
#26. We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. Waste is the name of the game, its greatest virtue. Politicians call it "refinements in domestic consumption." I call it meaningless waste.
Haruki Murakami
#27. Every year the progress of advanced capitalist society makes our population consist of more and more isolates. This is because of the infrastructure of the economy, especially electronic communications.
Mary Douglas
#28. The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
Terry Eagleton
#29. To develop political and economic power in a capitalist society, you need capital.
Bobby Seale
#30. It is obvious, moreover, that the formation of price in capitalist society must differ from the formation of price in social conditions based upon the simple production of commodities.
Rudolf Hiferding
#31. The banks own the corporations. In a capitalist society, the corporations have the most capital (money), and therefore they have the most influence. Presidential elections are funded by corporations, and in return the elected officials serve the interest of the corporations that supported them.
Joseph P. Kauffman
#32. The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#33. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#34. The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.
Clara Zetkin
#35. In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
Ayn Rand
#36. We're living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We'd rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other.
Frank Schaeffer
#37. Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.
Emily Greene Balch
#38. Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren't meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not.
Willem Dafoe
#39. In the capitalist society there is a place and bread for all. Its ability to expand provides sustenance for every worker. Permanent unemployment is not a feature of free capitalism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#40. The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
Karl Marx
#41. After wasting so much pulp and ink myself, who was I to complain about waste? We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all.
Haruki Murakami
#42. I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
George Saunders
#43. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.
Albert Einstein
#44. Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.
James Connolly
#45. All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution ...
Leon Trotsky
#47. Waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in an advanced capitalist society
Haruki Murakami
#48. The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.
James Connolly
#49. Capitalism Survive? - I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
#51. People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as 'parasites' fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.
Jason Read
#52. A parallel to this system of punishment is the trauma caused by enforced unemployment in capitalist society. Add to this an inability for the unemployed to find any imaginable alternative occupation, and the extent of the effects of network exclusion becomes clear.
Alexander Bard
#53. The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.
Peter Drucker
#54. America is America. It's a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.
Alice Walker
#55. The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.
Ludwig Von Mises
#56. There is no real answer (to the U.S. economic crisis) but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.
Robert Waterman McChesney
#57. To begin with, convinced socialists will derive satisfaction from the mere fact of living in a socialist society.4 Socialist bread may well taste sweeter to them than capitalist bread simply because it is socialist bread, and it would do so even if they found mice in it.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
#58. The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.
Helen Keller
#59. We live in an idiotic capitalist self-indulgent society where the sex life of a pop star is more important than impending starvation, land mines and child soldiers in Africa, or more interesting than the world's biggest man-made natural disaster in oil fields of the Middle East.
Peter Menzel
#60. Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.
William Graham Sumner
#61. That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society post-capitalist.
Peter Drucker
#62. The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.
Christopher Dawson
#63. I think journalism anywhere should be based on social justice and impartiality, making contributions to society as well as taking responsibility in society. Whether you are capitalist or socialist or Marxist, journalists should have the same professional integrity.
Tan Hongkai
Judy Polumbaum
#64. Organize society effectively. The capitalist system is not the result of our collective greed; it is the manifestation of the greed of a few and the manipulation of the many. A global superstructure has been established to
Russell Brand
#65. The trade-unionist has the same limitation imposed upon him as the capitalist. He cannot advance his interests at the expense of society.
Ramsay MacDonald
#66. The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.
Robert Nozick
#67. The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits.
Dinesh D'Souza
#68. The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist
Karl Marx
#69. Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.
Bell Hooks
#70. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.
Ivan Illich
#71. My view ... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.
John Grierson
#72. The formula for the circuit of capital: M-C...P...C'-M', is the self-evident form of the circuit of capital only on the basis of already developed capitalist production, because it presupposes the availability of the class of wage-labourers in sufficient numbers throughout society.
Karl Marx
#73. Marx himself is quite explicit that the capitalist is not individually responsible for the economic relations of his society, but is controlled by these relations as much as the workers are (C I 10).
Anonymous
#74. Profit is proof that the capitalist has given something to society that it cherishes more than the material wealth it has given to the businessman.
Johan Norberg
#75. Show me a first-generatio n fortune and I'll show you a successful partnership between a talented individual and society's invisible venture capitalist, the commons.
William H. Gates, Sr.
#76. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Karl Marx
#78. 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
#79. Capitalist production ... was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.
Friedrich Engels
#80. The liberal uses the radical's language to achieve the conservative's aim: the preservation of the capitalist system, and the traditional ethnic/racial hierarchy within society.
Manning Marable
#81. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.
George Soros
#82. It is untrue that some are poor because others are rich. If an order of society in which incomes were equal replaced the capitalist order, everyone would become poorer.
Ludwig Von Mises
#83. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?
A.E. Samaan
#84. Do I consider myself a part of the casino capitalist process? No I don't. I believe in a society where all people do well.
Bernie Sanders
