Top 100 Quotes About Capitalism
#1. Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
John Ralston Saul
#2. The purer the application of socialism, the worse the results, the purer the application of capitalism, the better the results.
James Cook
#3. The age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional.
Katherine Boo
#4. Competition-ruthless, unforgiving, to-the-death competition-is a crucial feature of capitalism.
Jim Stanford
#5. I wish we questioned the aid model as much as we are questioning the capitalism model. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is just say no.
Dambisa Moyo
#6. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.
Charley Reese
#7. the basic principle of capitalism: that the penalties (losses) no less than the rewards (profits) of risk taking shall go to those who embark on a productive venture.
George W. Stocking
#8. In capitalism, organizations respond to prices, real and anticipated, and to nothing else. In the process, the concept of moral responsibility traditionally entailed in the concept of ownership has disappeared.
Georgia Kelly
#9. Capitalism gives all of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and hang on to it.
Al Capone
#10. Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.
George Gilder
#11. Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress.
Nathaniel Branden
#12. Marx is only anti-capitalist
in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of
history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism,
discipline, force.
Albert Camus
#13. What vitiates entirely the socialists economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#14. Capitalism is astonishingly efficient at generating new wealth, but it operates beneficently only
when the market is shaped by moral forces coming from both the law and the culture-derived ultimately from religion.
Charles W. Colson
#15. Churches, like all the rest of our major institutions, are rooted in capitalism. For a church to attack capitalism is to 'bite the hand that feeds it.
Georgia Harkness
#16. The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society - we are on the eve of universal change.
Eugene V. Debs
#17. The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.
Richard Stallman
#18. Certainly the worker has nothing to lose by a change from government and capitalism to a condition of no government, of anarchy.
Alexander Berkman
#19. Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.
Joyce Appleby
#20. In America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism.
Frank Chodorov
#21. To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
H.L. Mencken
#22. No, Mr. Khrushchev, you may not have a wall. It will not prove that communism works. It will not work out well at all. Now, look, I agree capitalism isn't the be-all and end-all! Let me show you my last credit card bill. But you really need to put your thinking cap back on.
Liane Moriarty
#23. It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#24. War is the extreme edge of capitalism: an economic system so designed that it is always tipped in balance so that the mouth of the few is open
at the exact place where the food will fall from the lips of the hungry onto the tongues of the already satisfied.
Patricia J. McLean
#25. While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders.
Gary Hamel
#26. I work to promote the idea of sustainable capitalism driven by long-term considerations rather than quarterly profits, which seeks to better people's lives and the planet rather than destroy them.
Al Gore
#27. What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.
Naomi Klein
#28. Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
David Remnick
#29. The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism.
Will Hutton
#30. What the media is playing is what people want is really a false idea. Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.
Boots Riley
#31. From computers to information technology to airplanes, it has been America's unique blend of republican government and free-market capitalism that has allowed us to surpass all other nations in history.
George Nethercutt
#33. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.
Paul Ryan
#34. The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators.
John Lanchester
#35. As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.
Robert Kiyosaki
#36. It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.
Malcolm X
#37. Everyone had believed for capitalism and democracy to grow, the corporation had to grow; though that was wrong, the idea stuck. Democracy was the meme, but corporate growth was an idea imbedded into that meme. Hard to shake one from the other.
Carla R. Herrera
#38. 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
#39. Under capitalism each individual engages in economic planning.
George Reisman
#40. Think of the problem of the world as a cart. It has to have two wheels. If you have one wheel, the cart doesn't go. If you have one wheel called socialism, it doesn't go. If you have only one wheel called capitalism, it doesn't go. It needs two wheels. These two wheels are capitalism and socialism.
Benjamin Creme
#41. Who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism
Allen Ginsberg
#42. Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. Artists who work too hard to produce what consumers want are often accused of selling out. Thus, even the languages of capitalism and art conflict: a firm that has 'sold out' has succeeded, but an artist that has 'sold out' has failed.
Alex Tabarrok
#43. Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.
Michael Moore
#44. Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism.
Ron Paul
#45. You're seeing the first communist-produced automobile coming in to the U.S.. What I'm going to run on is a rebirth of capitalism.
John Raese
#46. Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#47. I think that the future belongs to democracy, but not to capitalism, because they are opposite camps.
Ricardo Alarcon
#48. Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.
Wolfgang Streeck
#49. Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices.
Ayn Rand
#50. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages.
Laurie Penny
#51. [Capitalism is] that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#52. Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.
Guy Debord
#53. The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile
it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent.
John F. Kennedy
#54. Socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for everyone else.
Robert Reich
#55. It must always remain the great curiosity of history - a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social processes. Capitalism
Jack London
#56. Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Fortunemagazine{115}
Thomas Sowell
#57. We are destroying capitalism to pay for socialism.
James Cook
#58. Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
H.L. Mencken
#59. Capitalism is based on the concept that in order for someone to succeed, someone else has to suffer.
Tawni O'Dell
#60. Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#61. Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
Tyler Cowen
#62. I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody's got to look over the shoulder of that child.
Tavis Smiley
#63. Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.
Alain Badiou
#65. The things that could be derived from the sexual sphere - happiness, endless fun and the end of capitalism - were grossly overestimated. The symbolic overglorification was downright unbearable.
Volkmar Sigusch
#66. Capitalism would have never let me be a filmmaker, living in Flint, Michigan with a high school education. I was going to have to make that happen myself.
Michael Moore
#67. Capitalism can be helpful, but it can also be destructive when it's used by huge enterprises worldwide for the sale of weapons.
Judy Collins
#68. Revenge is the capitalism of the poor: conserve the original wound, defer immediate gratification, fatten the first insult with new insults, invest and reinvest spite, and ke waiting for the perfect moment to strike back.
Aravind Adiga
#69. All those evils which the [liberals] interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism, are the necessary outcome of interference with the market.
Ludwig Von Mises
#70. 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
#71. I would not take one cup of coffee from a grower ... There's not a good one. I hate them. A few presents, a little talk, then the noose. That's how capitalism works.
Cesar Chavez
#72. Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.
Paul Hawken
#73. I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism.
Hugo Chavez
#74. We can't fool ourselves that they will ever be enough to overthrow Capitalism. If we're serious about that we need to organise ourselves in our workplaces and communities, making the links with other workers internationally.
John Blair
#75. Capitalism invariably boils down to barter between two willing parties, neither of whom uses force to work with the other.
Ben Shapiro
#76. Capitalism has been called a system of greed - yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
Ayn Rand
#77. I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
Michael Pollan
#78. Everybody wasn't always wasted. Why is punk rock about getting wasted? Isn't it punk rock to be sober and change the world? I thought it was about challenging capitalism? How are you going to challenge capitalism if you're wasted?
Kathleen Hanna
#79. I am running to fix the economy, restore the constitutional system of checks and balances and to end this game of crony capitalism by the ruling class in Washington.
Dave Brat
#80. It's increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose - or of a moral language - within government, media or business, could become one of the most dangerous own goals for capitalism and for freedom.
Elisabeth Murdoch
#81. Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future
if mankind is to have a future
Ayn Rand
#82. The capitalist system was termed "capitalism" not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx.
Ludwig Von Mises
#83. The Church's teaching on ownership diverges radically from collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism and "rigid" capitalism. The primacy of the person over things joint ownership of the means of work.
Pope John Paul II
#84. It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.
Ben Shapiro
#85. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.
Matt Taibbi
#86. At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
Herbert Marcuse
#87. And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.
Eric Hobsbawm
#88. Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy, if the term "economy" applies to what is scarce and therefore valuable.
Matthew B. Crawford
#89. Truth is not to be found either in traditional capitalism or in Marxism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically, capitalism failed to discern the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#90. Anarcho-capitalism: the realization that the only way to effectively govern the market is to have an effective market in governance.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#91. We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.
Tony Benn
#92. We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#93. Sooner or later we will reach a point where communitarian socialism turns global because capitalism is not even the solution to capitalism itself.
Evo Morales
#94. The experience of our generation:
that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Walter Benjamin
#95. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.
Murray Rothbard
#96. The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
H.L. Mencken
#97. Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism.
Martin Jacques
#98. Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
Angela Carter
#99. There is a serious tendency towards capitalism among the well-to-do peasants. This tendency will become rampant if we in the slightest way neglect political work among the peasants during the co-operative movement and for a very long period after.
Mao Zedong
#100. That is what capitalism is - a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.
Kim Stanley Robinson
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