Capitalist Quotes

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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

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.

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

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.

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.

The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?

Fernand Braudel

In capitalist enterprise there is no secure income and no security of wealth.

Ludwig von Mises

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

Can we reverse these deeply rooted sources sources of inequality? Or are they just endemic to a capitalist economy?

The vanguard of industrial investment in the world capitalist system is in the lowest paid segment of those countries paying the lowest wages. Young women in developing countries are the labor force on this frontier just as women and children were in the industrialization of England and Europe in the nineteenth century. Escaping the patriarchal restrictions of domestic production, young women workers are segregated in the new industrial compounds where they are subject to the patriarchal control of managers.

A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom.... Goodbye to all that.

The capitalist class is interested in keeping the workingmen divided among themselves. Hence it foments race and religious animosities that come down from the past.

We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them.

No company has a permanent consumer franchise. No one has the only game in town. The never-ending cycle of destruction and change inherent in a capitalist economy always provides new opportunities for those with determination, goals and concentration.

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

The crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is... to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.

I think these Western phenomena derive from capitalist society. They're movements denoting rejection of a society that has to be torn down. Whether they are called the Red Brigades or the hippies or the Beatles or the Children of God. And even though I'm against kidnappings and hijackings, I don't want to interfere with what they're doing.

Muammar Gaddafi

The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.

I remember my father explaining, "A capitalist system is a dog-eat-dog system."

Frances Fox Piven

All systems are capitalist. It's just a matter of who owns and controls the capital — ancient king, dictator, or private individual. We should properly be looking at the contrast between a free market system where individuals have the right to live like kings if they have the ability to earn that right and government control of the market system such as we find today in socialist nations.

The Albanian people will throw themselves in to the flames for their true friends, and the Soviet Union is such a friend of the Albanian people. And these are not empty words. I am expressing here the sentiments of our people and of our Party, and let no one ever think that we love the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the sake of some one's beautiful eyes or to please some individual, but because without the Soviet Union there would be no free life in the world today, fascism and capitalist terror would reign supreme. This is why we love and will always be loyal to the Soviet Union and to the Party of the great Lenin.

Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of the poor but the fault of 'society,' or of 'the capitalist system, then there is no definable limit to be set on relief, and the politicians who want to be elected or reelected will compete with each other in proposing new 'welfare' programs to fill some hitherto 'unmet need.'

The prudent capitalist will never adventure his capital... if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal tomorrow what it has enacted today.

William Henry Harrison