Morality Of Capitalism Quotes

Before I went to college I read two books. I read a book "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall which is a study of how corporations work, and it's actually a fascinating book, this sociologist, he just picks a corporation at random and just goes and studies the middle managers, not the people who do any of the grunt work and not the big decision makers, just the people whose job is to make sure that things day to day get done, and he shows how even though they're all perfectly reasonable people, perfectly nice people you'd be happy to meet any of them, all the things that they were accomplishing were just incredibly evil. So you have these people in this average corporation, they were making decisions to blow out their worker's eardrums in the factory, to poison the lakes and the lagoons nearby, to make these products that are filled with toxic chemicals that poisoned their customers, not because any of them were bad people and wanted to kill their workers and their neighbourhood and their customers, but just because that was the logic of the situation they were in.

Another book I read was a book "Understanding Power" by Noam Chomsky which kind of took the same sort of analysis but applied it to wider society which you know we're in a situation where it may be filled with perfectly good people but they're in these structures that cause them to continually do evil, to invade countries, to bomb people, to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, to do all th ~ Aaron Swartz

Putting some 'gray in play,' as Chad referred to it, always helped. HE said the act of rationalizing the pros and cons helped to cloud the issues enough to avoid a moral quandary. It allowed us to believe the ends justified the means. Seeing gray helped to remove the black-and-white, right and wrong ethical choices.. . Had I become so jaded in my life that I had actually forgotten the difference between right and wrong? Or had I simply tried to ignore the difference so I could sleep at least two or three hours a night? ~ Luke Lively

Seek comfort in the warmth of the morality of your choosing. Not in the depravity and fear of lost causes, in which you should turn away, before it sees you, as well.

- Plight, 2015 ~ Don Swann II

Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. ~ Paul Ryan

I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault. ~ Paul Ryan

The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress - that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations.
[...] This makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as women's work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it's the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care most about – our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions – are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it's taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things. ~ David Graeber

Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, and moral and intellectual culture, our fathers found that the divine ordinance of government, in every stage of the ascent, was adjustable on principles of common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality. ~ William M. Evarts

Back in Russia, where they're still getting acclimated to the whole capitalism thing, most TV advertising took a straightforward approach to persuasion. Thus, even though I don't speak Russian, I had no trouble understanding Russian ads. They were all along the lines o: "Oh, no, there's a stain on the tablecloth! What will Mom do? Thank goodness for this effective detergent!" Not so in Japan, where sophisticated consumers have grown bored with simple persuasion, forcing advertisers to get wildly inventive. Japanese TV ads have at this point evolved into an abstract mishmash of symbols and sounds. Your average thirty-second Japanese commercial is something like: Here's a man holding a giraffe. Now the giraffe morphs into a rainbow. The rainbow is friends with a talking pencil, and they live together on a spaceship. A few seconds of laughter! A snippet of loud reggae music! Fad out. At least half the time, I have no idea what the product being advertised is or what it does. And yet I very much enjoy the ads. They're like short-acting hallucinogens. ~ Seth Stevenson

The current Pandora's box of revelations about sexual crimes committed within the walls of so many of America's families reveals the nuclear family to be cruelly, aptly named. Patriarchy, sexism, and the culture of capitalism have created a "family" that too often is no more than a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. ~ Marita Golden

The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time. ~ Sam Harris

A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual. ~ Hakan Nesser

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which Smith published in 1776, is the most important book ever written about capitalism and its moral ramifications. Though The Wealth of Nations is in good part about commerce, it was not written for businessmen or merchants. A book focused on the analysis of market processes motivated by self-interest, it was written by one of the most admired philosophers of the Enlightenment, a former professor of logic, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy, in order to influence politicians and rouse them to pursue the common good. ~ Jerry Z. Muller

Principles are what people have instead of God.
To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbour's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.
Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them.
'Principle' is an even duller word than 'Religion'. ~ Frederick Buechner

It takes courage to have a conscience when you seem to see others getting something tangible out of not bothering to struggle with the morality of a situation. It gets frustrating and demoralizing. This is precisely where character comes in. All throughout history special people have felt compelled to do what they objectively saw as right and good - even in the face of humiliation or rejection or expulsion or torture or death. That is because they believed that certain ideas were more important than individual well-being. ~ Laura Schlessinger

The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned ~ Antonio Gramsci

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, ... a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion. ~ Frans De Waal

The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite possibly be a powerful party, but nevertheless it is only one party of many, nothing more than that. All its attempts to transform the exchange-ratios between economic goods that are determined in the market can only be undertaken with the instruments of the market. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? ~ George Orwell

I don't shy away from saying that the single most developed tradition of critical thought devoted to the study of capitalism was initiated by Karl Marx. His work was built on that of many people who preceded him. It does not offer the only set of solutions to our problems; it has its own shortcomings and failures. But if you want to think critically about capitalism, sooner of later you are going to have to encounter the theoretical traditions of Marxism, because it is the most developed and draws from contributions made from every country on Earth, from a thousand struggles against business and governments supporting capitalism. It's a repository, a rich resource that ought to be made use of by anyone who wants to have a balanced perspective when it comes to dealing with the real problems. ~ Richard Wolff

He who cares to go to the trouble of demonstrating the uselessness of index numbers for monetary theory and the concrete tasks of monetary policy will be able to select a good proportion of his weapons from the writings of the very men who invented them. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I tend to not use the word "socialist," because even though more young adults in the United States in a poll say they support socialism than do capitalism, the word socialism doesn't have a lot of meaning in this country. ~ Cynthia Kauffman

A good man: body serves his will and enjoys hard work, clear intellect that understands the truths of nature, full of passion for life but controlled by his will, well-developed conscience, loves beauty in art and nature, despises inferior morality, respects himself and others. ~ Thomas Huxley

The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians', and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of. ~ Kenny Smith

The state is a voluntary association of individuals designed to serve their individual interests. The state is not a faceless villain. The state is all of us. But freedom does not mean the freedom to commit violence. Violence includes direct and indirect action; i.e., it is just as violent to cause someone to starve to death by withholding aid as it is to shoot him, only sneakier. ~ Robert Peate

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable - namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. ~ Charles Darwin

If an ordinary man can be tapped to be the Messiah...then perhaps any one of us is capable of bringing about the Redemption. ~ Helen Maryles Shankman

Thus, seeking to produce a typology of forms of the art of government, La Mothe Le Vayer, in a text from the following century (consisting of educational writings intended for the French Dauphin), says that there are three fundamental types of government, each of which relates to a particular science or discipline: the art of self-government, connected with morality; the art of properly governing a family, which belongs to economy; and finally the science of ruling the state, which concerns politics. What matters, notwithstanding this typology, is that the art of government is always characterized by the essential continuity of one type with the other, and of second type with the third. ~ Michel Foucault

Those who live off of the donations of capitalism are often its greatest critics. ~ James Cook

The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining super capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent. ~ Larry McDonald

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. ~ Erich Fromm

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Religion, too, has defenders on both halves of the political spectrum. Even writers who are unwilling to defend the literal content of religious beliefs may be fiercely defensive of religion and hostile to the idea that science and reason have anything to say about morality (most of them show little awareness that humanism even exists). Defenders of the faith insist that religion has the exclusive franchise for questions about what matters. Or that even if we sophisticated people don't need religion to be moral, the teeming masses do. Or that even if everyone would be better off without religious faith, it's pointless to talk about the place of religion in the world because religion is a part of human nature, which is why, mocking Enlightenment hopes, it is more tenacious than ever. ~ Steven Pinker

Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

'Never put off tomorrow what you can do today.' Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow's work slop into today's and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow. ~ J. A. Spender