#ali

When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty. ↗

— Naomi Klein

#capitalism

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#material #pleasure #stuff #capitalism

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#capitalism #dishonest #hierarchy #honest #labor

The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield. ↗

— Naomi Klein

#war #capitalism

To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak! And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created. ↗

— Petrus Borel

#poverty #rich #wealth #capitalism

If you'd been taken by the Capital and hijacked and then tried to kill Peeta, is this the way he would be treating you? ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#capitalism

...a capital patient, as she never died and never got well. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#capitalism

Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it. ↗

— Michael Schudson

#media #objectivity #sociology #sociology

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people. ↗

— Bob Torres

#economics #marxism #poverty #sociology #sociology

originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#knowledge #originality #self-esteem #wisdom #self-knowledge