Capitalism Quotes
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I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists.
Michael Parenti -
American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.
Max Lerner
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War is capitalism with the gloves off.
Tom Stoppard -
If you want to see the acceptable face of capitalism, go out to an oil rig in the North Sea.
William Randolph Hearst -
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
Albert Camus -
Capitalism started out with a noble and high motive, but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against.
Martin Luther King, Jr. -
Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.
George Bernard Shaw -
You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of the slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future.
Albert Einstein -
Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.
Ernest Gellner -
The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy.
Lewis H. Lapham -
When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts.
Carroll Quigley -
Neither Italian fascism nor German national "socialism" have anything in common with such a [Soviet socialistic] society, primarily because private ownership of factories, plants, lands, banks, means of transportation, etc., remain untouched there, and, therefore, capitalism in Germany and Italy remains in full force.
Joseph Stalin -
It's a sad day for American Capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over central park.
Jim Moran
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Imperialism: The final stage of Capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin -
I used to be a businessman and I enjoyed what I did and I thought that it was socially useful. I don't have anything against business or private enterprise or capitalism per se, but I think that it is time to rethink the regulation of capitalism.
Charles Ferguson -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
Reckless capitalism kills black people.
Yasiin Bey Black Star -
Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.
Nick Cohen -
The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism.
Albion W. Small
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When we truly discover love, capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.
Bill O'Brien -
What I'm saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis.
Martin Luther King, Jr. -
We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.
Nicholas von Hoffman -
If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.
Max Lerner