Capitalism Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man's social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.

Ludwig von Mises

It is this trick of capitalism, of subjecting labor to competition, while lifted wholly above it by class law itself, that is objectionable.

Joshua K. Ingalls

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

A. J. P. Taylor

The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.

Ludwig von Mises

I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that is has survived at all. (...) I'm not sure capitalism is the right word. There is a sense in which every society is capitalist. The Soviet Union was capitalist, but it was state capitalism. Latin American societies in the past have been capitalist, but it has been oligarchic capitalism. So what we really need to talk about is not capitalism but free market or competitive capitalism which is the system that we would like to have adopted, not just capitalism.

Milton Friedman

Talking about how one country is better or worse or weaker or whatever during this pandemic is like if a herd of angry rhinos was stampeding toward you and you just kept yelling that you have on nicer shoes than the guy next to you. Rhinos. Don't. Care. Right now – this moment – is a horrible and also crucial time. It's showing us not just the incredibly ridiculous flaws in capitalism, but it's also demonstrating our shared humanity. We must join together, fight this thing, and shed our toxic nationalism.

Like cancer, capitalism grows until it murders the host body. During this pandemic shutdown, it's not getting the growth it needs and parts of it are becoming benign.

Western capitalism really does want to see turmoil in China. And not only that; they'd like to see turmoil in the Soviet Union and all the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.

If you make the mistake of capitalism, you should not be criticized. But we should have self-criticism.

We lost the competition to Capitalism.

After having gradually replaced the socialism model with market economy

Fascism is used by the bourgeoisie when the latter consider itself no longer able to fight off the peril of a socialist revolution. Fascism is, therefore, organic to the logic of capitalism and represents a more authoritarian handling that bosses temporary use, when necessary, in order to maintain their rule.

The competition between capitalism and socialism should not be feared: the reasons for the latter are stronger than those of the former.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

Walter Benjamin

The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism-money.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

The new anticapitalist are, in spirit and motive, deontologists, and thus criticized not so much the consequences of capitalism (though this teleological elements is present), but motives, e.g., the profit motive, acquisitiveness, 'materialism' and the like.

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.

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.

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism.

Ludwig von Mises

The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the ;thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good.

Ralph Barton Perry

The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism - the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.