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Capitalism Quotes

Browse 2965 quotes about Capitalism.

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Capitalism Quotes

“Liberalism and capitalism address themselves to the cool, well-balanced mind. They proceed by strict logic, eliminating any appeal to the emotions. Socialism, on the contrary, works on the emotions, tries to violate logical considerations by rousing a sense of personal interest and to stifle the voice of reason by awakening primitive instincts.”

TryingMindWellsReasonVoiceInterestEmotionLibertyEconomicCapitalismEconomicsLogicInstinctAwakeningContrarySocialismAppealsLiberalismAddressesConsiderationLogicalBalancedPrimitiveStrictEliminatingPersonal InterestVoice Of Reason
Book:Socialism - An Economic and Sociological Analysis: The Economist
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“The recurrence of periods of depression and mass unemployment has discredited capitalism in the opinion of injudicious people. Yet these events are not the outcome of the operation of the free market. They are on the contrary the result of well-intentioned but ill-advised government interference with the market.”

PeopleWellsGovernmentResultsLibertyOpinionEconomicEventsPeriodsMassCapitalismEconomicsIllContraryOperationsOutcomesUnemploymentFree MarketInterferenceRecurrence
Book:Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism
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“Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.”

PeopleWorldHumansMeanBeautifulFormOrderKnownLibertyAliveEconomicConditionsMankindDesignParticularActivityEssentialsSurvivalCapitalismEconomicsRegardAimPopulationProductionsPleasantCapitalistOwnershipOrganizeIndispensablePreservationPreferenceFree MarketDeliberateHuman Activity
Author:Friedrich August von Hayek
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“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.”

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Book:The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
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“Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.”

MenWellsEarthDesireGoalKnownLibertyPovertyEconomicHighestStandardsEvidenceCapitalismWestEastLibertarianExperimentsWell BeingContrastLibertarianismLaboratoryDemonstrationBerlinStandards Of LivingProclaimingEast Berlin
Book:Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
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“The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.”

Has BeensImportantStatesGovernmentLossUnitedLibertyUnited StatesEconomicIndustryLetting GoCapitalismMiracleProfitLibertarianPlanningEnterpriseWeedDeclineLibertarianismFree MarketStagnationPrivate EnterpriseFosteringCartelsProfit And LossCentralized Government
Author:Milton Friedman
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“In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.”

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Author:John Kenneth Galbraith
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“The companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties”

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Book:Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The wheels of commerce
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“Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other”

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Book:Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition
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“We who are members of the Communist Party repudiate the exclusive identification of democracy with capitalism. We declare that democracy can be widened, take on new aspects, become truly a rule of the people, only when it is extended to the economic life of the people, as in the Soviet Union. As far as women are concerned, the U.S.S.R. is a trailblazer for equal rights and equal opportunities.”

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Author:Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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“Smith, as we have said, was not the proponent of any one class. He was a slave to his system. His whole economic philosophy stemmed from his unquestioning faith in the ability of the market to guide the system to its point of highest return. The market — that wonderful social machine — would take care of society's needs if it was left alone. "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production," he wrote.”

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Author:Robert Heilbroner
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“It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.”

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Book:The Essential Galbraith
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“The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments.”

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Author:Peter Drucker
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“Currency speculation-over a trillion dollars a day-is a tax-free activity. The notion of a tax on "day trades" or other speculative swaps was revived in recent years, but has been studiously ignored by all our purveyors of conventional economic wisdom. That is because we have been persuaded, against logic, and moral sense, that the institution that most needs our support these days is not society, nor the human community, but the global corporation.”

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Author:Eric Kierans
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“The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers. Thus, whenever there is a conflict between the consumers' views and those of the business managers, market pressures assure that the views of the consumers win out eventually.”

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Book:On the Manipulation of Money and Credit
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“The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people's mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what”

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Book:Bureaucracy
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“We do not assert that the capitalist mode of economic calculation guarantees the absolutely best solution of the allocation of factors of production. Such absolutely perfect solutions of any problem are out of reach of mortal men. What the operation of a market not sabotaged by the interference of compulsion and coercion can bring about is merely the best solution accessible to the human mind under the given state of technological knowledge and the intellectual abilities of the age's shrewdest men.”

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Author:Ludwig von Mises
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“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

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Author:Pope Francis
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“The New Capitalism (arising from the global economic downturn)...those running our biggest commercial businesses will have to be more visible. They'll have to manifest a genuine understanding not only of the anxieties of their employees but of all taxpayers. Those chief executives who succeed will be those who imbue in their businesses very simple, commonsense standards of decency”

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Author:Robert Peston
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“Capitalism brainwashes us through advertising and the skewing of priorities .... We need economies that promote human values, seek to limit suffering, and are committed to democratic principles, rather than ones dependent on global trade and a blind commitment to neo-liberal economic policies.”

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Author:Sulak Sivaraksa
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“The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic and political patterns …it is safe to predict that… such social inventions as modern-type capitalism, facism and communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern methods”

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Author:Ralph Linton
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“What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.”

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Book:End of History and the Last Man
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“Prior to the advent of the civilization of the Third Estate (mercantilism, capitalism), the social ethics that was religiously sanctioned in the West consisted in realizing one’s being and in achieving one’s own perfection within the fixed parameters that one’s individual nature and the group to which one belonged clearly defined. Economic activity, work, and profit were justified only in the measure in which they were necessary for sustenance and to ensure the dignity of an existence conformed to one’s own estate, without the lower instinct of self-interest or profit coming first.”

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Author:Julius Evola
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“It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform”

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Author:Eric Hobsbawm
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“The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.”

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Book:Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
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“It looks like the age of the mass is behind us and the age of the individual is upon us. The chasm that now exists between new people and old organizations is destroying economic value and inhibiting the emergence of a new chapter of capitalism aligned with the needs of this new society. The new purpose of commerce is to provide the tools, platforms, and relationships, digital or human, that enable individuals to live the lives they choose.”

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Author:Shoshana Zuboff
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“Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.”

MenNeedsShouldWould BeFormValuesFeltAcceptingEconomicEthicsCapitalismLaborBasesCharityNotionCreditLibertarianVersionsEnterpriseGoodsDivisionAnarchyCashRegulationTokensLaissez FaireGoods And ServicesDivision Of LaborLaissez Faire Capitalism
Author:Karl Hess
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“A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.”

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Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World
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“We've now become conscious of the uncalculated social, economic, and environmental costs of that kind of "unconscious" capitalism. And many are beginning to practice a form of "conscious capitalism," which involves integrity and higher standards, and in which companies are responsible not just to shareholders, but also to employees, consumers, suppliers, and communities. Some call it "stakeholder capitalism."”

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Author:Patricia Aburdene
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