Privatisation Quotes

Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all ... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World ~ Arundhati Roy

Equity is compromised due to the privatisation of education. Education has become a commodity. Those who can afford to buy it, buy it, and those who can sell it make money out of it ~ Kailash Satyarthi

With deregulation, privatisation, free trade, what we're seeing is yet another enclosure and, if you like, private taking of the commons. One of the things I find very interesting in our current debates is this concept of who creates wealth. That wealth is only created when it's owned privately. What would you call clean water, fresh air, a safe environment? Are they not a form of wealth? And why does it only become wealth when some entity puts a fence around it and declares it private property? Well, you know, that's not wealth creation. That's wealth usurpation. ~ Elaine Bernard

Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true - it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair. ~ Vladimir Potanin

More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The privatisation of the symbolic sphere is a strictly relative affair, not least if one thinks of the various Victorian contentions over science and religion, the culture industry, the state regulation of sexuality and the like. Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States. Late modernity (or postmodernity, if one prefers) takes some of these symbolic practices back into public ownership. ~ Terry Eagleton

Today's ideology masquerades as pragmatism with that pragmatism reduced to the simplistic assumption that the basis of human nature is self-interest, a view which discount philanthropy, discredits altruism, with the only motive deserving of trust self-promotion and self-advancement.
This so-called pragmatism is wicked and it is doubly so because it is held up as being both realistic and a virtue. Whereas it is shallow, shabby and all too often callous. ~ Alan Bennett