Capitalist Quotes

469 Sourced quotes

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

Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.

Timothy Garton Ash

Health is the working man's fortune, and he ought to watch over it more than the capitalist over his largest investments. Health lightens the efforts of body and mind. It enables a man to crowd much work into a narrow compass. Without it, little can be earned, and that little by slow, exhausting toil.

William Ellery Channing

What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm. … Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty.

The idea that money begets money, and that the rich and powerful enjoy unfair advantages, goes against what we are taught - or like to believe - about the capitalist system.

If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Historical, political economic systems theory. The Marxian approach to system theorizing clearly points us to sociologically important phenomena: the material conditions of social life, stratification and social class, conflict, the reproduction as well as transformation of capitalist systems, the conditions that affect group mobilization and political power, and the ways ideas functions as ideologies.

It is in underdeveloped world that he central, overriding fact of our epoch becomes manifest to the naked eye: the capitalist system, once a mighty engine of economic development, has turned into a no less formidable hurdle to human advancement.

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing: it ends where the interests of the business begin... In socialist areas, it is enough to recall that the means of social communication are the monopoly of the party.

Apart from their work and production, households perform other important economic functions. Most CONSUMPTION occurs within the household. … In developed capitalist economies, private consumption spending accounts for half or more of GDP.

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.

A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The 'survival of the fittest' is beneficently inevitable; the capitalist is powerless against labor, unless the State... steps in, and helps him catch and fleece his victims. The old plea of despotism, that liberty is unsafe, reappears now in the mistaken notion that competition is hostile to labor.

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.

Joseph Schumpeter

That was a piece I did in 1963 with Konrad Lueg in a department store, in the furniture department. It was announced in some papers as an exhibition opening, but the people who came didn't know that it was to be a sort of Happening. I don't think it is quite right that it has become so famous anyhow. It was just a lot of fun, and the word itself, Capitalist Realism, hit just right. But it wasn't such a big deal.

Gerhard Richter

I originally came from Dresden, where Socialist Realism prevailed. Konrad Lueg and I came up with it, for the most part ironically, since I now live in capitalism. It was certainly 'realism', but in another form - the capitalist form, as it were. It wasn't meant that seriously. It was more a slogan for that particular Happening at a furniture store.

Gerhard Richter

The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.

In a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

Son of a bitchin' no good lousy ass anarchistic capitalist bitch. That's what I say about my relatives, but you won't say it.

The second dimension is called "command," and it refers to those aspects of economic relationships that involve power, coercion, hierarchy, subordination, or authority. In capitalist (and many other) societies, command is a central aspect of the workplace, the household, and the government. It concerns relations among nations, classes, races, men, women, and other groups in society as well.

Europeans were anxious to acquire gold in Africa because there was a pressing need for gold coin within the growing capitalist money economy.

In speaking of the European slave trade, mention must be made of the U.S.A., not only because its dominant population was European but also because Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to North America than to any other part of the globe, and established a powerful form of capitalism—after eliminating the indigenous inhabitants and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans.

Unions, communities, people, everybody's going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society, and that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive.

Don Blankenship

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.

Every form of government, regardless of it being social-democratic, socialist, or capitalist, needs growth. Growth means in its simplest form that more things are produced with fewer things being consumed during the process. This is the only way to prosperity which implies a greater abundance of goods and services while fewer resources are used up.