#capitalism

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless. ↗

— E.L. Doctorow

#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

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. ↗

— Chris Hedges

#death

The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. ↗

— Guy Debord

#death

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#democracy #neoliberalism #design

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#capitalism #consumerism #dfw #solipsism #dreams

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like. ↗

— David Graeber

#capitalism #redefining-consumption #dreams

...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust ↗

— Nathanael West

#capitalism #commercialization #conformity #disillusionment #self-perception