#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

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

The use of market values and technology as a social barometer has devalued the worth of individuals, rendered irrelevant the quality of their lives, and stunted their creativity. ↗

— Sulak Sivaraksa

#capitalism #economics #sociology #sociology

Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it's part of him, and it's like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn't doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he's bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn't successful he's big with his property. That is so.' 'But let a man get property he doesn't see, or can't take time to get his fingers in, or can't be there to walk on it - why, then the property is the man. He can't do what he wants, he can't think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big - and he's the servant of his property. That is so, too. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#ownership #funny

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