#capitalism

In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse. ↗

— Petrus Borel

#injustice #justice #poverty #rich #wealth

Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American. ↗

— Roger Lowenstein

#business #capitalism #capitalist #character #warren-buffett

Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords. ↗

— David Remnick

#capitalism #far #henry #more #russia

Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism. ↗

— Carlos Fuentes

#imperialism #racism #reality #racism

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#capitalism

Let him come to Charcy, with his hithertos and his wherefores, and there he will find me, and with all the might of my kingdom I will scourge him from the field. "And if you want a personal message," said Laurent, "You can tell my uncle boykiller that he can cut the head off every child from here to the capital. It won't make him into a king, it will simply mean he has no one left to fuck. ↗

— S.U. Pacat

#capitalism

Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater! ↗

— Gilles Deleuze

#psychoanalysis #shit #capitalism

Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings. ↗

— Laurie Penny

#feminism #women #love

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. ↗

— John Burdett

#capitalism #economics #politics #western-civilization #inspirational

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. ↗

— Francis Spufford

#economics #marxism #planned-economy #socialism #imagination