Quotes about capitalism
page 8

“Modern technique, as Marx pointed out, fosters the concentration of capital, and the levels of profits is supported by a scarcity of enterprise which is not due to the real cost of risk-bearing, but to the scarcity of individuals who have anything to risk.”

Joan Robinson book An Essay on Marxian Economics

Source: An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966), Chapter VII, The Orthodox Theory of Profit, p. 57-58

Support

“Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.””

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Attributed by Sir George Schuster, Christianity and human relations in industry (1951), p. 109
Recent variant: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
As quoted in Moving Forward: Programme for a Participatory Economy (2000) by Michael Albert, p. 128
Attributed

Men, World, Motivation

“The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and ethnic. He resuscitated the culture of the colonized and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived Indian handicrafts and made these into an economic weapon against the colonizer in his call for swadeshi — the use of one's own and the boycott of the oppressor's products, which deprive the people of their skills and their capital.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)

People

“The pendulum started swinging towards the true spirit of Islam at the very start of Shah Jahan’s reign in 1628 AD. Its outer symbol was the reappearance of the beard on the face of the emperor. …. In 1635 AD, Shah Jahan’s soldiers captured some ladies of the royal Bundela family after Jujhar Singh and his sons failed to kill them in the time-honoured Rajput tradition. In the words of Jadunath Sarkar, “Mothers and daughters of kings, they were robbed of their religion and forced to lead the infamous life of the Mughal harem.” Shah Jahan himself made a triumphal entry into Orchha, the capital of the Bundelas, demolished the lofty and massive temple of Bir Singh Dev, and raised a mosque in its place. Two sons and one grandson of Jujhar Singh who were of tender age, were made Musalmans. Another son of Jujhar Singh, Udaybhan, and a minister, Shyam Dawa, had fled to Golconda where they were captured by Qutbul-Mulk and sent to Shah Jahan. According to Badshahnama again, “Udaybhan and Shyam Dawa, who were of full age, were offered the alternative of Islam or death. They chose the latter and were sent to hell.””

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Jadunath Sarkar; Badshahnama https://archive.org/stream/cu31924073036778#page/n63/mode/2up, quoted in Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. Chapter 7 ISBN 9788185990231

Life, Death, Age, Family

“Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 3, Production, Consumption and Surplus Value, p. 95

Money

“The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

God, Religion, Law, Dreams

“Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

World

“If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air… We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of 'a public debt being a public blessing,' and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper.”

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

ME 13:423
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

War, Truth

“The Simulation imposed upon us by shadow governments and hidden elites must be exposed and destroyed. That includes a cancerous art establishment based on commerce and the malignant dictums of predatory capitalism that negates individual breakthroughs based on lived experience.”

Nick Zedd (1958) American film maker

The Extremist Manifesto, 2013

Art

“The people are weary of being oppressed, persecuted, exploited to the maximum. They are weary of the wretched selling of their labor-power day after day — faced with the fear of joining the enormous mass of unemployed — so that the greatest profit can be wrung from each human body, profit later squandered in the orgies of the masters of capital.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Cuba as Vanguard (1961)

People, Fear

“Under the old type of capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature. Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the exporter of capital has become the typical feature.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Four, "The Export of Capital"

“You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Preface, p. xi
2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011)

People

“Towards the end of his life, Schumpeter re-painted his picture of capitalist development on an even broader canvas. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter 1950), he offered a complex, multifaceted argument that the type of capitalism he had earlier described might be passing from the historical scene, morphing by small degrees into some variety of socialism.”

Sidney G. Winter (1935) American economist

Dynamic Capability as a Source of Change, 2008

Life, Democracy, Painting

“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.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

Money, God, Motivation, Drawing

“But the net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 5, Organization of Capitalist Production, p. 146

“It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy. After forty-five days this campaign in the West was equally and emphatically terminated.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Berlin: Hitler’s Order of the Day Calling for Invasion of Yugoslovia and Greece http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-order-of-the-day-calling-for-invasion-of-yugoslovia-and-greece-april-1941 (April 6, 1941) 1940s

War, History

“The King of Wu said，"Enough, general. Retire to your hostel, We do not wish to come down and observe." Sun Tzu said, "The king only loves the words, he cannot make use of the reality." After this, Ho-lu knew that Sun Tzu could command troops and in the end appointed him commander. [Later when Wu] defeated mighty Ch’u to its west and entered its capital Ying awed Ch'i and Chin to its north and spread its fame among the feudal lords, it was due in part to Sun Tzu.”

Sima Qian book Records of the Grand Historian

translated by Tsai-fa Cheng, Zongli Lu, William H. Nienhauser, Jr., and Robert Reynolds, in The Grand Scribe’s Records, edited by William H. Nienhauser, Jr. 孫子吳起列傳 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B2%E8%A8%98/%E5%8D%B7065 Records of the Grand Historian

Love, Reality, Sun, Parting

“Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to ﬁll the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment… Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by conﬁscation and expropriation… The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to ﬂood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort. …[T]he great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

The Daily Chronicle and New York Times (April 23, 1919), Paul Miliukov, Bolshevism: An International Danger, London: UK, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010, pp. 75-76, first published in 1920
1910s

Money, Way, Evil, Country

“Democracy for the cast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i. e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people - this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to Communism.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Marxism: Essential Writings, "The State and Revolution"
The State and Revolution (1917)

People, Democracy, Communication, Change

“But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder. Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act. And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act,—at least in theory.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Capital Punishment

“The whole result of continued labour is not often consumed and enjoyed in a moment; the result generally lasts for a certain length of time. We must then conceive the capital as being progressively uninvested.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter VII, Theory of Capital, p. 191.

Time

“I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez in March 2005 http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/chavez_opposition_capitalism.htm 2005

World

“The boat set sail upon the great river
whose swollen waters stretched to sky's edge.
Sky and waves split apart suddenly—
the district capital's thousands of homes.
Moving on, I can see the town market
and vaguely make out mulberry and hemp.
I turn to gaze back toward my homeland—
only vast floods that stretch to the clouds.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"Written Crossing the Yellow River to Qing-he" (渡河到清河作)

Home, Water

“I chose to paint because the medium as such has a particular meaning. It is almost synonymous with what is popularly viewed as Art - art with a capital A-with all the glory, the piety, and the authority that it commands.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

1980s Source: Bois,Yve-Alain, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss. " A Conversation with Hans Haacke http://www.kim-cohen.com/artmusictheoryassets/artmusictheorytexts/Haacke_Interview.PDF." in: October : The First Decade 30 (fall 1984): 23-48

Art, Painting

“The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture — MTV, Disney — this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

The slyer virus: The West's anti-westernism (2002)

People, Question, Reality, Time

“.. the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

War, Peace, Law, Communication

“Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. … The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 149

Money, God

“No regulation of commerce can increase the quantity of industry in any society beyond what its capital can maintain. It can only divert a part of it into a direction into which it might not otherwise have gone; and it is by no means certain that this artificial direction is likely to be more advantageous to the society than that into which it would have gone of its own accord. Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in his view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter II, p. 486.

Nature, Study, Parting

“Truth', written 'in capital letters', is an orphan in this world, without power and influence… ['Reason'] cannot stand diverging opinions - it calls them 'lies'; it puts itself 'above' the real lives of human beings, demanding, in a way characteristic of all totalitarian ideologies, the right to rebuild the world from the height of 'what it should be', i. e. in accordance with its own 'invincible' precepts. It refuses to recognize the many ideas, actions, feelings, laws, institutions, racial features which separate one nation (culture, civilization) from another… The reason of ordinary people trying to create a better and safer world for themselves and their children (which is reason with a small 'r' and not Reason 'written in capital letters') has very little in common with these ignorant dreams of domination.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Farewell to Reason

pg 102.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

Children, People, Truth, World

“It's depressing to realize how few of the teams in our lives use their human capital and opportunities well, when it comes to sustaining performance, innovating, or adapting. That's true whether we're talking about families, sports, projects, management, or research.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Boyatzis (2012) " The Resonant Team Leader http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/the_resonant_team_leader.html" at HBR Blog Network, April 13, 2012.

Family, Sport

“The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)

War, Books, Error, Evil

“The nature of the instability of an unregulated free-enterprise system is only now beginning to be clearly understood. Perhaps the degree of understanding already attained ensures that the grosser shortcomings have gone for ever, and to that extent the conflict between Capitalism and Communism is about issues that belong to the past. It may now be too late. The gods must smile to note how different the state of the world might have been if the progress of economic thought of the last twenty years had been advanced by even ten years.
The possibility of a stable economic life with full utilization of our resources is still not sufficiently assured, and it is extremely important that it should be so assured, and that the whole world should accept this as a fact. The work that is being done in econometrics is massive, and undaunted by mathematical difficulties, but it appears, at any rate as viewed from outside, to be unclear as to its aim.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 1

Life, God, World, Smile

“Although founded on majority rule, a democratic society must recognize and apply individual, minority and group rights. In other words, majority rule must be understood within the context of the rule of law and human dignity… This resolves the tension between populism and human rights, since democracy must not be abused to diminish human rights, e. g. by legitimizing torture or capital punishment, even if public opinion could be invoked or manipulated to demand it. Thus, it is necessary to strengthen the enforcement of national and regional bills of rights to provide a process and atmosphere for democracy to flourish, ensured by an independent judiciary that provides the necessary protection of both majority and minority interests.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
2013

Law, Democracy

“Professors everywhere deplored examinations as an archaic technique, a fossil that recalled little red schoolhouses and memorizing the capitals of all the states. Regular progress and daily diligence mattered more, they felt, not an hour spent compressing months of learning onto a few sheets of paper. Far better to stress homework, classroom participation and the professor’s judgment. Regrettably, the large size of classes, and the requirements of society itself for pseudo-objective standards kept the exam structure firmly in place.”

Gregory Benford Artifact

Part 4, Chapter 1 (pp. 155-156)
Artifact (1985)

Learning

“I was noodling around Rotten Tomatoes, trying to determine who played the bank's security chief, and noticed the movie had not yet been reviewed by anybody. Hold on! In the "Forum" section for this movie, "islandhome" wrote at 7:58 a. m. Jan. 8: "review of this movie … tonight i'll post." At 11:19 a. m. Jan. 10, "islandhome" was finally back with the promised review. It is written without capital letters, flush left like a poem, and I quote it verbatim, spelling and all:
:hello sorry i slept when i got back
:well it was kinda fun
:it could never happen in the way it was portraid
:but what ever its a movie
:for the girls most will like it
:and the men will not mind it much
:i thought it was going to be kinda like how to beat the high cost of living
:kinda the same them but not as much fun
:ill give it a 4 0ut of 10
I read this twice, three times. I had been testing out various first sentences for my own review, but somehow the purity and directness of islandhome's review undercut me. It is so final. "for the girls most will like it/and the men will not mind it much."”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

How can you improve on that? It's worthy of Charles Bukowski. ...The bottom line is some girls will like it, the men not so much, and I give it 1½ stars out of 4. Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mad-money-2008 of Mad Money (17 January 2008) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Men, Way, Quotes, Girl

“Protocols: What also indeed is, in substance, a loan, especially a foreign loan? A loan is an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation commensurate to the sum of the loan capital. If the loan bears a charge of 5 percent, then in twenty years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in forty years it is paying a double sum, in sixty treble and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt.
from this calculation it is obvious that with any form of taxation per head the State is bailing out the last coppers of the poor taxpayers in order to settle accounts…; instead of collecting
Graves: These two books were written 40 years apart from each other…why is the same interest rate employed by the “Protocols?””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Surely they must have changed during all that time.
Raslovlev: Very revealing…eh?
Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.85

Books, Change, Time

“As today’s form of capitalism is not compatible with our social and cultural value system, sooner or later it will be damaging to the foundations of societies and the values they are built on.
Therefore, capitalism must be upgraded in a way that is compatible with societal and cultural values and with the fairness principle to provide equal opportunities.”

Dirk Helbing (1965) Complex systems scientist

" An Urgent Appeal to Save the Planet, Part IV: Upgrading Today’s Capitalism https://www.theglobalist.com/capitalism-society-equality-sustainability-crowd-funding/" (August 23, 2017)

Way

“If a 19th century capitalist Machiavelli had wished to cripple the socialist intelligentsia of the 20th century, he could have invented no more cogent weapon than the labour theory of value. Yet this theory was the invention, not of a defender of capitalism, but of its greatest critic: Karl Marx.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 13, Nothing To Lose But Their Minds, p. 270–271 (See also: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VI, p. 58)

“Hip-Hop's last hope like Obi-Wan Kenobi
Through your television I'm shining light like a train
Comin out like earthworms when it rains, bringing it
like the C. I. A. be bringing in crack cocaine bailing out of planes
with the George Bush connections, I push Reflection
like I'm selling izm, like a dealer building the system
Supply and the demand it's all just capitalism
Niggaz don't sell crack cause they like to see blacks smoke
Niggaz sell crack cause they broke”

Talib Kweli (1975) American rapper

The Manifesto, Lyricist Lounge, Vol. 1 (1998)
Albums, Singles and compilations

Hope, Light, Training

“It is neither capital nor labor but management that brings success, since management will attract capital, and capital can employ labor.”

Henry J. Heinz (1844–1919) American businessman

Henry J. Heinz, cited in: John Woolf Jordan (1915). Genealogical and Personal History of Western Pennsylvania. p. 38

Success

“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, Sydney Peace Prize address http://johnpilger.com/articles/breaking-the-great-australian-silence, Sydney Opera House, 5 November 2009

War, Food, Dreams, Hope

“The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" (2014), in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, p. 513

Nature

“Our critique of capitalism is precisely that value production turns everything, whether meat or poetry, into commodity, and that it's no use asking for more love poems and less hamburgers.”

Gilles Dauvé (1947) French writer

"Letter on Animal Liberation" (1999)

Love

“The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism' our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", (1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

“The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (April 13, 1895)
Letters

Love, Happiness, Thinking

“For two hundred and fifty years, from the second half of the eighteenth Century on, Capitalism was the dominant social reality. For the last Hundred years, Marxism was the dominant social ideology. Both are rapidly being superseded by a new and very different society. The new society – and it is already here – is a post-capitalist society… The center of gravity in the post-capitalist society – its structure, its social and economic dynamics, its social classes, and its social problems – is very different from the one that dominated the last two hundred and fifty years”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Drucker (1993) Guru Guide. p. 293-294 as cited in: Nancy Campbell (2004) "The Practice of Management and the Idea of Leadership: An Overview of Theory and Practice"

Problem, Reality

“These trends have given rise to a despairing attitude among those who see the political implications of demographic trends. The best and brightest families-those who will never be on welfare, who are owners and bequestors of capital, who have the willingness to be risk takers and who serve as the political backbone of the ‘free society have been outbred by people who exhibit fewer of these traits. Making matters worse, immigration law has been biased in favor of the latter, not the former, group.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: ""Trophy Kids"" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, October 1997, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1997oct-00008,

People, Family, Law, Despair

“Capitalism might be defined, if we wish to be scientific, as a form of economic organization motivated by the pursuit of profit within a price structure.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 8, Canaanite and Minooan Civilizations, p. 240

Motivation

“More than ever before, for humanity to live under capitalism, is to live on borrowed time.”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

from the 1969 book Empire and Revolution.
1960s

Time

“As the title of his 1941 book indicates, the theory of capital lay at the heart of his theory of the cycle. The reason is that he attributes the cycle not to changes in aggregate demand, or even to changes in the quantity of capital, but to changes in the structure of production and hence the structure of the capital stock. In this, his theory was highly unusual: one of the reasons for his failure to engage more effectively with Keynes was the latter’s inability to see how the theory of capital could be of any importance for the cycle. Because the theory of capital is so central, and because it is so complex, it needs to be explained carefully. After that, the rest of his theory falls into place comparatively easily.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

Books, Failure, Change, Heart

“The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 13, Crisis In The Space Economy Of Capitalism, p. 418

“For all of us who have been fortunate enough to make capital, we can’t take it with us in any case, so let’s act responsibly with it. Let’s put something back in.”

Ronald Cohen (1945) British businessman

Jewish Chronicle, 21 September 2007, p. 38

“Some Tories have tried to make political capital by demonising minorities instead of showing confidence in all the citizens of our country.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Conservative Party conference http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/oct/07/conservatives2002.conservatives1 (07 October 2002)

Confidence, Country

“Aware that the city was architecturally unworthy of her position as capital of the Roman Empire, besides being vulnerable to fire and river floods, Augustus so improved her appearance that he could justifiably boast: "I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble."”
Urbem neque pro maiestate imperii ornatam et inundationibus incendiisque obnoxiam excoluit adeo, ut iure sit gloriatus marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam accepisset.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Augustus, Ch. 28

Appearance, Clothes

“Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

God, War, Secret, World

“I'm not a big fan of other people's punctuation. When I read a script I've got a sort of automatic eraser. I don't see punctuation or capitals or instructions. I want to decide when the sentence is over. Who's to say when a sentence ends and the other one begins? Sometimes it begins in the middle of the next sentence.”

Christopher Walken (1943) American actor

Jason Walsh (October 17, 2004) "Walken on the edge", Marin Independent Journal, Section: Lifestyles.

People, Reading

“As the world becomes increasingly inter-linked and competitive, we know that our future economic success and prosperity will be predicated upon the strength of our human capital, and our ability to forge and to sustain competitive advantage.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)

World, Success, Future

“Economic logic requires that we maximize the productivity of the limiting factor in the short run, and invest in increasing its supply in the long run. When the limiting factor changes, then behavior that used to be economic becomes uneconomic. Economic logic remains the same, but the pattern of scarcity in the world changes, with the result that behavior must change if it is to remain economic. Instead of maximizing returns to and investing in man-made capital (as was appropriate in an empty world), we must now maximize returns to and invest in natural capital (as is appropriate in a full world). This is not “new economics,” but new behavior consistent with “old economics” in a world with a new pattern of scarcity.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

Herman E. Daly (1994) in: AnnMari Jansson. Investing in Natural Capital: The Ecological Economics Approach To Sustainability. 1994. p. 24

World, Behavior, Nature, Change

“To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to N.A. Leikin (December 24, 1886)
Letters

Color

“Other common names for fascism are 'crony capitalism', 'state capitalism', 'corporate socialism' and 'mercantilism'. Sometimes members of the mercantile class become partners with the state and, in certain circumstances, even end up controlling it. The whole thing looks like a different system than ordinary socialism until you apply the ethical definition. What's more important in a fascist society, the needs and wants of the group, or the rights of the individual? As Mr. Spock once famously observed (in the original James Blish novel Spock Must Die), 'a difference that makes no difference is no difference.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"To Reduce Them Under Absolute Despotism".

“Since Judaism made Christianity possible and gave it the character of a religion essentially free from magic, it rendered an important service from the point of view of economic history. For the dominance of magic outside the sphere in which Christianity has prevailed in one of the most serious obstructions to the rationalization of economic life. Magic involves a stereotyping of technology and economic relations. When attempts were made in China to inaugurate the building of railroads and factories a conflict with geomancy ensued … Similar is the relation to capitalism of the castes in India. Every new technical process which an Indian employs signifies for him first of all that he leaves his caste and falls into another, necessarily lower … An additional fact is that every caste makes every other caste impure. In consequence, workmen who dare not accept a vessel filled with water from each other's hands, cannot be employed together in the same factory room. Obviously, capitalism could not develop in an economic group thus bound hand and foot by magical means.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. by Frank Knight, 1961. p 265

Life, Religion, History, Water

“From the lowest and broadest stratum of Society, where the births are by the million, there was born, almost in our own memory, a Robert Burns; son of one who "had not capital for his poor moor-farm of Twenty Pounds a year." Robert Burns never had the smallest chance to got into Parliament, much as Robert Burns deserved, for all our sakes, to have been found there. For the man—it was not known to men purblind, sunk in their poor dim vulgar element, but might have been known to men of insight who had any loyalty or any royalty of their own—was a born king of men: full of valor, of intelligence and heroic nobleness; fit for far other work than to break his heart among poor mean mortals, gauging beer! Him no Tenpound Constituency chose, nor did any Reforming Premier: in the deep-sunk British Nation, overwhelmed in foggy stupor, with the loadstars all gone out for it, there was no whisper of a notion that it could be desirable to choose him,—except to come and dine with you, and in the interim to gauge.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Men, Intelligence, Birth, Beer

“By the Revolution the Germans have made themselves pariahs among the nations, incapable of winning allies, helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital, and deprived of all self-respect. In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution.”

Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) German Army officer and later Nazi leader in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch

"My War Memories, 1914–1918" - by Erich Ludendorff - 1919

People, Time

“My idea is, that if capital and labor are left alone they will mutually regulate each other. People who think they can regulate all mankind and get wrong ideas which they believe to be panaceas for every ill cause much trouble to both employers and employees by their interference.”

Jay Gould (1836–1892) American businessman

Testimony to the New York Senate Committee on Labor and Education"
Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

People, Idea, Thinking

“That in all capital or criminal prosecutions a man bath a right to demand the cause and nature of his accusation, to be confronted with the accusers and witnesses, to call for evidence in his favor, and to a speedy trial by an impartial jury of twelve men of his vicinage, without whose unanimous consent he cannot be found guilty; nor can he be compelled to give evidence against himself; that no man be deprived of his liberty, except by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Article 8
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

Men, Law, Nature

“There were four years, 1931-1935, when I was myself a member of Hayek's seminar in London; it has left a deep mark on my thinking… At the end of the discussions in that seminar … we were, I believe, on the point of taking what now seems to me to be a decisive step. I was, at least, on the point of taking it myself. There is evidence for that in my "Value and Capital", much of the groundwork for which was done before I left London.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Source: Classics and Moderns, (1983), p. 97

Thinking, Decision

“Capitalism is dying and its extremities are already decomposing. The blotches upon the surface show that the blood no longer circulates. The time is near when the cadaver will have to be removed and the atmosphere purified.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

Time

“It is natural for government and business leaders to want to make the best of a bad situation. For example, articles on Watergate postulated that we are now better off because the crisis demonstrated the strength of a democracy. Some contend that the Exxon Valdez oil spill had a good side in that there were many "lessons learned". THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! I do not subscribe to the "I have to fail to learn and improve" theory. A set-back leading to "experience and growth" is one thing; total failure is another. Few corporations could sustain as much bad press as Exxon, not to mention the opportunity cost of billions of dollars that could have been applied more profitably elsewhere. An organization's most precious resources are its time, energy (individual and corporate) and capital. They should be directed toward increasing profit, providing better service and improving the organization's reputation. They should not be wasted on damage control. Yet we continue to hear stories of crisis situations that drain organizations of that valuable energy and focus.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 4-5

Democracy, Failure, Business, Nature

“There are two things in the world that can never get on together—religion and common sense. Religion deals with the next life, common sense with this; religion points to the sky, common sense to the earth; religion is all imagination, common sense all reason; religion deals with what nobody can understand, common sense with what everybody can understand; religion gives us no return for our investments but flash notes on the bank of expectation, common sense gives us good interest and full security for our capital. They are as opposite as two things can possibly be, and they are always at strife. Religion is always trying to fill the world with delusions, and common sense is always trying to drive them away. Religion says Live for the next world, and common sense says Live for this.”

George William Foote (1850–1915) British secularist and journal editor

"Christianity and Common Sense" http://www.ftarchives.net/foote/flowers/114commonsense.htm, p. 114 Flowers of Freethought (1893)

Life, World, Religion, Imagination

“The Chinese economy would be brutally transformed into the mightiest manufacturing nation based on western capital and on an abundance of cheap, highly submissive labour.”

Peter Cain (1958) figure skater

Source: J. A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study: A Centennial Retrospective (2002), p. 10.

“Capitalism uses force but it also educates the people to its system. Direct propaganda is carried out by those entrusted with explaining the inevitability of class society, either through some theory of divine origin or through a mechanical theory of natural law.
This lulls the masses since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against which it is impossible to struggle. Immediately following comes the hope of improvement — and in this, capitalism differed from the preceding caste systems, which offered no possibilities for advancement.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

People, Education, Law, Hope

“We must ask, not whether an anarcho-capitalist society would be safe from a power grab by the men with the guns (safety is not an available option), but whether it would be safer than our society is from a comparable seizure of power by the men with the guns. I think the answer is yes. In our society, the men who must engineer such a coup are politicians, military officers, and policemen, men selected precisely for the characteristic of desiring power and being good at using it. They are men who already believe that they have a right to push other men around - that is their job. They are particularly well qualified for the job of seizing power. Under anarcho-capitalism the men in control of protection agencies are selected for their ability to run an efficient business and please their customers. It is always possible that some will turn out to be secret power freaks as well, but it is surely less likely than under our system where the corresponding jobs are labeled 'non-power freaks need not apply.”

David D. Friedman book The Machinery of Freedom

Source: The Machinery of Freedom, 1973, pp. 123-124

Men, Secret, Business, Thinking

“The soldier's lot is the most melancholy relic of barbarism (next to capital punishment) that lingers on among mankind.”

Alfred De Vigny book Servitude et grandeur militaires

L'existence du Soldat est (après la peine de mort) la trace la plus douloureuse de barbarie qui subsiste parmi les hommes.
Servitude et grandeur militaires; (ed.) Paul Viallaneix Oeuvres complètes, (1965) p. 358; translation from Humphrey Hare (trans.) The Military Necessity (1953) p. 17. (1835).

“No fixed capital can yield any revenue but by means of a circulating capital.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book II, Chapter I, p. 311.

“[Professor Jennifer] Burns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives or liberals for that matter, refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism—a system in which huge corporations, aided by the state, dominate a heavily-regulated and centrally-directed economy. This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate, this is what the New Left opposed. One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me thirty years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labour, specialise in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. Bookchin told me that he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions.”

Jeff Riggenbach (1947)

About Murray Bookchin
"Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement," 2010

People, Understanding

“The election [of 1919] indicated that the prevailing sentiment in the country was to the left and Mussolini acknowledge this face by still in 1920 calling himself a socialist, albeit a dissident. He continued to campaign for nationalization of land, workers’ participation in the running of factories and partial expropriation of capital,…”

Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) British historian

Source: Mussolini, 1983, p. 40

Country

“A company's success no longer depends primarily on its ability to raise investment capital. Success depends on the ability of its people to learn together and produce new ideas”

Arie de Geus (1930) Dutch businessman

Arie de Geus, in: " Arie de Geus: The Thought Leader http://www.strategy-business.com/article/17421?gko=cedb2," in: Strategy & Business. April 1, 2001, Nr 22-25. p. 26

People, Idea, Learning, Success

“The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.”

Henry George book Progress and Poverty

Book VIII, Ch. 3
Progress and Poverty (1879)

Intelligence, Communication, Nature

“By Mammonism is to be understood: on the one hand, the overwhelming international money-powers, the supragovernmental financial power enthroned above any right of self-determination of peoples, international big capital, the purely Gold International; on the other hand, a mindset that has taken hold of the broadest circle of peoples; the insatiable lust for gain, the purely worldly-oriented conception of life that has already led to a frightening decline of all moral concepts and can only lead to more.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

Life, Money, People

“I began to read Capital, just as one reads any book, to see what was in it; I found a great deal that neither its followers nor its opponents had prepared me to expect.”

Joan Robinson book An Essay on Marxian Economics

Preface To The Second Edition, p. vi
An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966)

Books, Reading

“The principal contradiction within capitalism from the outset was that between the capitalists and the workers. To keep their system going, the capitalists had constantly to step up the rate of exploitation of their workers. At the same time, European workers were gaining increasing mastery over the means of production in the factories and mines, and they were learning to work collectively in big enterprises and within their own trade union structures. If the bourgeoisie continued to deprive them of the major part of the fruits of their own labor and to oppress them socially and politically, then those two classes were set on a collision path. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Marx had predicted class collision would come in the form of revolution in which workers would emerge victorious. The capitalists were terribly afraid of that possibility, knowing full well that they themselves had seized power from the feudal landlord class by means of revolution.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 314.

Learning, Time, Victory, Parting

“One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 96

“The difficult thing for someone not living the experience of the revolution to understand is this close dialectical unity between the individual and the mass, in which the mass, as an aggregate of individuals, is interconnected with its leaders.
Some phenomena of this kind can be seen under capitalism, when politicians capable of mobilising popular opinion appear, but these phenomena are not really genuine social movements. (If they were, it would not be entirely correct to call them capitalist.) These movements only live as long as the persons who inspire them do, or until the harshness of capitalist society puts an end to the popular illusions which made them possible.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Understanding, Appearance, Personality

“We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim’s pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.”

Mark Steyn book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006)

War, Children, World, School

“Managers try to make the workplace safer and less destructive (= more productive) of a precious capital: labour. Animal exploitation duplicates this process. It tends to experiment less on animals in order to get more from them, painfully if it must, painlessly if it can”

Gilles Dauvé (1947) French writer

"Letter on Animal Liberation" (1999)

Animals

“Entrepreneurs often are organizational products… The capital required, human resources, space, information, permits and licenses are all provided, perhaps grudgingly, by existing organizations.”

John H. Freeman (1944–2008) (1944-2008) US-American sociologist and organizational theorist

John H. Freeman, "Entrepreneurs as Organizational Products: Semiconductor Firms and Venture Capital Firms," Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Growth, 1 (1986): 33-52

“What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 39-40

Secret, Imagination, Question, Success

“It is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism, but one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (15 May 1973) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/may/15/cbi-and-tuc-talks Prime Minister

“Let us… take the most concrete example of state capitalism… It is Germany. Here we have the 'last word' in modern, large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics and [substitute] a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Left Wing' Childishness", Pravda (May 1918).
1910s

“In the course of history periods of capitalism and socialism alternate with one another; capitalism is the unnatural, socialism the natural economic system…The National Socialists and the Red Front have the same aspirations. The Jews falsified the Revolution in the form of Marxism and that failed to bring fulfilment.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Speech in Potsdam (13 October 1926), quoted in Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 92-93.
1920s

History, Nature

“Question: …you believe the Fed shouldn't exist… make the case.
Ron Paul: First reason is, it's not authorized in the Constitution, it's an illegal institution. The second reason, it's an immoral institution, because we have delivered to a secretive body the privilege of creating money out of thin air; if you or I did it, we'd be called counterfeiters, so why have we legalized counterfeiting? But the economic reasons are overwhelming: the Federal Reserve is the creature that destroys value. This station talks about free market capitalism, and you can't have free market capitalism if you have a secret bank creating money and credit out of thin air. They become the central planners, they decide what interest rates should be, what the supply of money should be…
Question: How does the gold standard solves that?
Ron Paul: It maintains a stable currency and a stable value. If the Fed concentrated more on stable money rather than stable prices… They push up new money in stocks and in commodities and in houses, and then they have to come in to rescue the situation. They create the bubbles, then they come in and rescue it, and they do nothing more than try to do price fixing. Capitalism depends, and capital comes from savings, but there's no savings in this country, so this is all artificial. It creates the misdirection and the malinvestment and all the excessive debt, and it always has to have a correction. Since the Fed has been in existence, the dollar has lost about 97% of its value. You're supposed to encourage savings, but if something loses its value, why save dollars? There's no encouragement whatsoever. […] Gold is 6000 years old, and it still maintains its purchasing power. Oil prices really are very stable in terms of Gold. […] Both conservatives and liberals want to enhance big government, and this is a seductive way to tax the middle class.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

CNBC debate with Faiz Shakir, March 20, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94VWPjUQSM 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, Secret, Way, Question

“The fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U. S. A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 138

People, Nature

“This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly bound in our suffering Latin American lands. A struggle of masses and of ideas. AN epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and and corned by imperialism; our peoples, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of tat flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

People, Idea, Suffering

“I am never going to make another comment about another capital city, I promise you, I promise you that.”

Robert Doyle (1953) Australian politician

News.com.au http://www.news.com.au/mayor-surprised-adelaide-has-tv/story-0-1225699598081

“I am not so much concerned with the return on capital as I am with the return of capital.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

The Prudent Professor: Planning and Saving for a Worry-Free Retirement (2011) by Edwin M. Bridges, Brian D. Bridges;
Forbes Guide to the Markets: Becoming a Savvy Investor (2009) by Forbes, LLC, Marc M. Groz
The National Underwriter, Volume 45 (1941), p. 12: "As Eddie Cantor put it years ago, after getting burned in the stock market, the life insurance policyholder is more interested in the return of his money than in the return on it."
Misattributed