#capital

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#beauty #bias #bourgeois #capitalism #creativity

Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. ↗

— Iain M. Banks

#earthers #economics #free-enterprise #socialism #art

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in the bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy uber alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and riving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#capitalism #economics #beauty

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse. ↗

— Frank Zappa

#capitalism #music #business

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#capitalism #commerce #goods #property #theft

The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#capitalism #judgement #success #business

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. ↗

— Eduardo Hughes Galeano

#change

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#death-penalty #gandalf #j-r-r-tolkien #lord-of-the-rings #death

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#crime #death #justice #punishment #death

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#death #life #right-to-die #suicide #death