“Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.”

— David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 386

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could …" by David Graeber?

David Graeber 55

American anthropologist and anarchist 1961

Related quotes

“Trade unions up to a certain point have been recognised now as organs for good. They are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn, they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose.”

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley (1828–1921) English judge

Lyons & Sons v. Wilkins (1896), 74 L. T. Rep. (N. S.) 364. Compare Mogul Steamship Co. v. MacGregor, Gow, & Co., 66 L. T. Rep. (N. S.) 1; Temperton v. Russell and others, 69 L. T. Rep. (N. S.) 78.

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

“We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. […] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: The Guide for the Perplexed

“Hit the Poles so hard that they despair of their life; I have full sympathy with their condition, but if we want to survive, we can only exterminate them; the wolf, too, cannot help having been created by God as he is, but people shoot him for it if they can.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

Haut doch die Polen, daß sie am Leben verzagen; ich habe alles Mitgefühl für ihre Lage, aber wir können, wenn wir bestehn wollen, nichts andres tun, als sie ausrotten; der Wolf kann auch nicht dafür, daß er von Gott geschaffen ist, wie er ist, und man schießt ihn doch dafür totd, wenn man kann.
Letter to his sister Malwine (26/14 March 1861), published in Bismarck-Briefe (Second edition Göttingen 1955), edited by Hans Rothfels, p. 276 http://books.google.de/books?id=oIkkkcUIfqMC&pg=PA276; as quoted in Hajo Holborn: A History of Modern Germany 1840-1945 (1969), p. 165 http://books.google.de/books?id=rUgOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA165
1860s

“I hope nothing valuable may have been taken from the house in spite of you, but you know what women are—they always want to do the best they can for the man who marries them, and never give another thought to the children of their first husband, nor to their father either when he is dead and done with.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XV. 19–23 (tr. Samuel Butler).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

“He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.”

Orson Scott Card Songmaster

Songmaster (1979)

“He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them?”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1780s, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)
Context: He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.

“What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter V : Anatomy Of The Corporate State, p. 107

“Normally man’s mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as ‘’his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs.’’ He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour’s time, a day’s time, a month’s time an no more. He never asks himself: what are the ‘’limits’’ of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune is the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, a new tie, etc.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Six, The Question of Identity

“In part, free trade has not worked because we have not tried it: trade agreements of the past have been neither free nor fair. They have been asymmetric, opening up markets in the developing countries to goods from the advanced industrial countries without full reciprocation.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Making Globalization Work

§3, p. 62
Making globalization work (2006)

“Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

David Graeber 55

Related quotes

Related topics