Disaster Capitalism Quotes

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it. ~ Edwidge Danticat

The slogan for contemporary capitalism--fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward ~ Naomi Klein

All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy. ~ Ayn Rand

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the future, thus justifying gross inequality and humiliation today. ~ Carne Ross

Historically, usury was defined as any interest whatever on an unproductive loan.Our whole banking system I have ever abhorred, I continue to abhor, and I shall die abhorring. ~ John Adams

That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third. ~ Orson Scott Card

We do not believe that capitalism, or any economic system, is the cause of female oppression, nor do we believe that female oppression will disappear as a result of purely economic revolution. ~ Anne Koedt

I think what we're going to ultimately recognize is that capitalism was a transitional and immature system. It got the planet to be globalized and now something else has to emerge. We have to be the ones. We can't wait around. Nobody else is going to do it for us. We have to be the ones who create that new emerging system. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ
who I think was the first socialist
only socialism can really create a genuine society. ~ Hugo Chavez

I touched my forehead against hers. "And I'm yours." Her hands left my shoulders and skimmed hesitantly over my back. "I mean it, Sunshine. You deserve better, but if you still want me even after knowing what a disaster I am, then I'm all in. I'm too selfish to walk away." I leaned back. "But don't say I didn't warn you. ~ Rachel Harris

Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn't do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared to a Utopia, will pale in comparison. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires. ~ Walter E. Williams

You are a princess. And princesses do not run away when things become difficult. They throw their shoulders back and they face what disaster awaits them head on. Bravely, and without complaint. ~ Meg Cabot

The power of capitalism to mediate the gap between rich and poor is pretty incredible. Indeed, I think, year by year, the gap gets less. ~ Bill Gates

Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. ~ David Suzuki

In every disaster, in every blessing, ask, "Why me?" There's a reason, of course, there's an answer. ~ Richard Bach

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production? ~ Arundhati Roy

You're wearing a bow tie," I said necessarily.
He glanced over at me. "Mom said I had to dress up for this."
I heard a low snort of laughter coming through the open window above the sink.
And I knew.
I stalked over to the window and looked outside.
There, sitting spread out on the grass, were the rest of the Bennetts.
Goddamn fucking werewolves.
"Hello, Ox," Elizabeth said without a jint of shame. "Lovely day, isn't it?"
"I will deal with you late," I said.
Ooh," Carter said. "I actually got chills from that."
"We're just here for support," Kelly said. "And to laugh at how embarrassing Joe is."
"I heard that!" Joe shouted from behind me.
I banged my head on the windowsill.
"Maggie," Joe said. Then, "May I call you Maggie?"
"Sure." My mother sound like she was enjoying this. The traitor. "You can call me Maggie."
"Good," Joe glanced down at his card berfore looking back up at my mother. " There comes a time in every werewolf's life when he is of age to make certain decisions about his future."
I wondered if I threw something at him if it'd distract him enough for me to drag him out of the kitchen. I glanced over my shoulder out the window. Cater waved at me. Like an asshole.
"My future," Joe said, "is Ox."
Ah god, that made me ache. "Is that so?" Mom asked. "How do you figure?" "He's really nice," Joe said seriously. "And smells good. And he makes me happy. And I want to do nothing more t ~ T.J. Klune

Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture. ~ Ai Weiwei

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits. ~ Karl Marx

So my sister, she slipped through the cracks of the disaster of our family. She became her own disaster. ~ Chris Pavone

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. ~ Olivia Laing

The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it's part of him, and it's like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn't doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he's bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn't successful he's big with his property. That is so.'
'But let a man get property he doesn't see, or can't take time to get his fingers in, or can't be there to walk on it - why, then the property is the man. He can't do what he wants, he can't think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big - and he's the servant of his property. That is so, too. ~ John Steinbeck

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. ~ Leonard E. Read

Just as sex is a God-given instinct for the prolongation of the human race, so the desire for property as a prolongation of one's ego is a natural right sanctioned by natural law. A person is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call property his own. Internal freedom is based upon the fact that "I am"; external freedom is based on the fact that "I have." But just as the excesses of flesh produce lust, for lust is sex in the wrong place, so there can be a deordination of the desire for property until it becomes greed, avarice, and capitalistic aggression. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

The institutional requirements of community pose fundamental issues that neither corporate capitalism nor state socialism ever took seriously. The critical point of departure is the question: Can you have Democracy with a big D in any system if you don't have democracy with a small d in the actual experience and everyday community life of ordinary everyday citizens? ~ Gar Alperovitz

We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted ... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things ... ~ H.P. Lovecraft

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god ~ Ali Shariati

Paugh!" the troll scoffed. "Romance. Kissing and folly. Where's the story, where's the philosophy? I'm a troll, and even I can't rip a bodice. You should read real literature. The classics." He held up a book called Ye Olde Clubbe of Fisticuffs. "This is one of my favorites. It's all about, like, rejecting capitalism." He held up another, the spine as yet uncracked, called Alliance of Nincompoops. "Or this one, about a misunderstood genius. You should read it. I'd love to chat about what the true meaning of success is when we're living in a world that values looks instead of substance. ~ Delilah S. Dawson

The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Do not mislead Perez Anna or malign the people who have sheltered you for over twenty years. We are not - what is the word for eaters of one another?"
"Capitalists," said Anna. ~ Eleanor Arnason

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy's doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice. ~ Robert Dallek

Every separate economic agent maintains a stock of money that corresponds to the extent and intensity with which he is able to express his demand for it in the market. If the objective exchange-value of all the stocks of money in the world could be instantaneously and in equal proportion increased or decreased, if all at once the money-prices of all goods and services could rise or fall uniformly, the relative wealth of individual economic agents would not be affected. Subsequent monetary calculation would be in larger or smaller figures; that is all. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology. ~ Serge Lang

If we cannot abate the disaster, the one honor we have is the probity of our lucidness. ~ Rainer J. Hanshe

He studied the composition of food-stuffs, and knew exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates his body needed; and by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the value of all he ate, so that it cost him eleven cents a day. About the first of July he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot; and when he struck the harvest fields he would set to work for two dollars and a half a day, and come home when he had another year's supply - a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was the nearest approach to independence a man could make "under capitalism," he explained; he would never marry, for no sane man would allow himself to fall in love until after the revolution. ~ Upton Sinclair

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg. ~ Margaret Drabble

Ultimately, the important thing to companies isn't ethics. It's money and power. For decades, they've been happily complicit in this bullshit system as long as money was being made. Men like Harvey Weinstein aren't losing their careers because movie studios are growing spines and hearts. They're losing careers because of the Everest-esque mountain of damning evidence stacked against them and that the public outcry might make those studios lose money. ~ Mallory O'Meara

His small fragile ship had barely escaped a disaster; now it enters a region of new storms and uncharted depths through which even the best led ... cannot find a guide. He must find his own way and be his own saviour. ~ Hermann Hesse

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac. ~ Michael Moore