Capitalism Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.

Immanuel Wallerstein

Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

The successful sale of British Telecom... reveals a vast and untapped yearning among ordinary people for a direct stake in the ownership of British enterprise. Investment in shares has begun to take its place, with ownership of a home and either a bank or building society deposit, as a way for ordinary people to participate in enterprise and wealth creation. We are seeing the birth of people's capitalism.

The gospel of St. Matthew told of the angry Jesus driving the merchants and money-changers out of the temple, knocking over the tables of the money-changers and spilling their coins on the floor. Jesus was not opposed to capitalism and the profit motive, so long as economic activities were carried on outside the temple. In the parable of the talents, he praises the servant who used his master's money to make a profitable investment, and condemns the servant who was too timid to invest. But he draws a clear line at the temple door. Inside the temple, the ground belongs to God and profit-making must stop.

Once socialism replaces capitalism, reason will determine the policies of states.

10 per cent inflation is not heaven and the factors are all still there to push it up much further next year. Nor has the Government any policy adequate to deal with unemployment. It is not capitalism that is in crisis. It is Socialism that is in collapse. The faith has vanished. The principles are shattered. It won't do for Liberals merely to say they will put on the brakes. Even if you slow down the Gadarene swine, they will go over the precipice eventually.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.

Ludwig von Mises

Karl Marx did not call for an opposition to the forces of history. On the contrary he accepted all of them, the drive of technology, the revolutionizing effects of democratic striving, even the vagaries of capitalism, as being indeed the carriers of a brighter future.

Robert Heilbroner

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.

Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.

Money cannot make armaments. Armaments can only be made by the skill of the British working class, and it is the British working class who would be called upon to use them. To-day you have the most glorious opportunity that the workers have ever had if you will only use the necessity of capitalism in order to get power yourselves. The capitalists are in your hands. Refuse to make munitions, refuse to make armaments, and they are helpless. They would have to hand the control of the country over to you.

Stafford Cripps

At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.

Lewis H. Lapham

We must take from the right nationalism without capitalism and from the left socialism without internationalism.

Gregor Strasser

Colonial possessions added to the prestige, and to a much lesser degree to the wealth, of Europe. But the primary cause of Western affluence and power is internal – the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism acting in concert.

Slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital, but it is too rigid for industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude non-breakable tools which held back the capitalist development of agriculture and industry. That explains the fact that the northern portions of the U.S.A. gained far more industrial benefits from slavery than the South, which actually had slave institutions on its soil; and ultimately the stage was reached during the American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within the boundaries of the U.S.A. so that the country as a whole could advance to a higher level of capitalism.

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.

State capitalism is about more than emergency government spending, implementation of more intelligent regulation, or a stronger social safety net. It's about state dominance of economic activity for political gain.

... it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism.

Joseph Goebbels

This new and enlarged edition of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism contains additions and alterations so great as to constitute it in effect a new book.

Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!

Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.

Kenneth Rexroth

Because of his social position there are left no limits to the power lust of the modern capitalist. He can interfere with inconsiderate egoism in the lives of his fellowmen and play the part of Providence for others. Only when we take into consideration this passionate urge for political power over their own people as well as over foreign nations are we able really to understand the character of the typical representatives of modern capitalism. It is just this trait which makes them so dangerous to the social structure of the future.

Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism.

To understand the economy then is to comprehend how it is driven by the animal spirits. Just as Adam Smith's invisible hand is the keynote of classical economics, Keynes' animal spirits are the keynote to a different view of the economy — a view that explains the underlying instabilities of capitalism.