Quotes About Democracy And Capitalism

#1. At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.

Nick Harkaway

#2. Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.

Slavoj Zizek

#3. From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.

David P. Ellerman

#4. We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities.

Alain Badiou

#5. In 2003, I warned of a 'creeping coup' in Russia against the forces of democracy and market capitalism in Russia.

John McCain

#6. As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.

Andreas Laurencius

#7. If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

John Ralston Saul

#8. We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia.

Bill Moyers

#9. Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.

Christopher Hitchens

#10. Monitor, transparently, and enforce the separation of Democracy powers: Legislative; Executive; Judicial

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

#11. I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

Garry Kasparov

#12. The rules of workplace democracy are founded in solidarity and mutual trust. They are at the core of a historic process which promises to introduce a new economy, and thereby a new society, after capitalism.

Seymour Melman

#13. Democracy is impossible in a capitalist system. Capitalism is the realm of injustice and a tyranny of the richest against the poorest.

Hugo Chavez

#14. Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.

H.L. Mencken

#15. This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

Tariq Ali

#16. Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.

Michael Moore

#17. But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.

Vladimir Lenin

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. The government may change faces from time to time, but it's not like we fight wars for democracy - we fight wars for capitalism and for oil.

Woody Harrelson

#21. We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.

Thomas Piketty

#22. We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.

George Soros

#23. 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

#24. He saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse.

Clive James

#25. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism

Martin Luther King Jr.

#26. One cannot equate "capitalism" and "democracy.

Wilhelm Reich

#27. [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

#28. Democracy ... .[is not] ... simply a form of government but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity.

Thomas King

#29. I'm passionate about restoring the efficacy of American democracy, making capitalism sustainable, prioritizing advances in technology, and seizing the opportunities to use that kind of innovation to help usher in a new economy that doesn't rely on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.

Al Gore

#30. Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship.

Don Tapscott

#31. We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.

J. William Fulbright

#32. 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

#33. In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Matt Taibbi

#34. British rule meant not democracy -colonialism is almost by definition underdemocratic - but limited constitutional liberalism and capitalism

Fareed Zakaria

#35. 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

#36. The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached.

Fareed Zakaria

#37. Capitalism is against the things that we say we believe in - democracy, freedom of choice, fairness. It's not about any of those things now. It's about protecting the wealthy and legalizing greed.

Michael Moore

#38. Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.

Henry Giroux

#39. [There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.

Michael Palin

#40. Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It's - given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence.

Alan Greenspan

#41. Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

David Korten

#42. Democracy is not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner.

Henry Giroux