#cap

The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.” (Analects 4.16) ↗

— Confucius

#china #consumerism #greed #greed

Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#capitalism #corruption #greed #politics #politics-of-the-united-states

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#ceos #corporations #delusion #inequality #service

One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run. ↗

— Mike Norton

#die #dig #digging #escape #evil

Still dressed in matching butler suits with pink bow ties, the redcaps filed into the dining room, every one of them scowling at me. Ash's eyes widened and he quickly hid his mouth under his laced fingers, but I saw his shoulders shaking with silent laughter. Luckily, the redcaps didn't notice. ↗

— Julie Kagawa

#redcap #laughter

We're all prostitutes if you think about it. The whole capitalist system is built on meretriciousness. You sell your body or you sell your mind, and the Cartesian mind/body thing is a fallacy anyway, your mind is just your brain, so it amounts to the same thing really. ↗

— M. Thomas Gammarino

#mind-body-problem #prostitution #japan

You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll be working pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o'clock. ↗

— S.J. Perelman

#invisible #kick #meal #perelman #satire

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#escape #escapism #fiction #interpretation #narrative

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost. ↗

— Peter Høeg

#lost #recapture #understand #snow

The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from it; they are indeed at the service of economic power and the international trusts. The socialist empires for their part are hard and intransigent, they do not allow pluralism, they impose dialectical materialism, demand blind obedience to the party, set up a regime of total and permanent insecurity and fear, just like the fascist dictatorships of the extreme right. ↗

— Hélder Câmara

#communism #politics #communism