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Economic Quotes

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Economic Quotes

“If you cloned JFK and Abraham Lincoln and made them president it wouldn't matter. Our system is just too corrupt and too broken. I think that science is corrupt and broken. I think health and nutrition. I think the economic systems, the international relations, the environment, everything, the engines of everything are broken.”

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Author:Rainn Wilson
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“For nearly two centuries, scholars and politicians have debated the future of capitalism. Its critics, most prominent among them Karl Marx, have seen capitalism as intrinsically unstable, full of contradictions that will lead eventually to its collapse. Its supporters see it as the best way to allocate resources and rewards. Some even hint that the democratic capitalistic society is not just a phase in the historical evolution of economic systems but its ultimate end.”

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Author:Raghuram Rajan
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“We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth.”

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Author:Kenneth Keniston
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“The Lockean assumption that if we put our labor to it then it becomes our own is totally fallacious. We have to figure out how to leave things alone, and build an economic system that's not built on a linear model, but instead on a cyclical model, because that's the natural world - it's cyclical and not linear. That is going to take a lot of transformation.”

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Author:Winona LaDuke
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“We can only live the changes we wish to see: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. We must break the obsolete social and economic systems that divide the world between the over-privileged and the under-privileged. Each of us, whether government leader or protester, business executive or worker, professor or student, share a common guilt.”

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Author:Ivan Illich
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“What does a man need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by.”

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Author:Sterling Hayden
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“We need to reject not only outdated fossil-fuel technology, but also an outdated economic system and an outdated corporatist political system. The progressive view is that we are smart enough and ethical enough to not have to be subservient to corporations. We can create our own resilient, localized communities.”

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Author:Tim DeChristopher
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“The economic system that the United States has is an evil empire. It's an economic system that's not fair, not just, and it's not democratic. And it will fall just like communism fell. The richest 1 percent now own 50 percent of the wealth. It didn't use to be that way. The average CEO 20 years ago made 20 times as much as the average employee. Now they make 212 times as much.”

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Author:Michael Moore
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“It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.”

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Author:Alan Watts
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“So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery.”

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Author:Herbert Croly
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“I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?”

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Author:R. Buckminster Fuller
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“It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy".”

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Author:John Lanchester
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“Economics, over the years, has become more and more abstract and divorced from events in the real world. Economists, by and large, do not study the workings of the actual economic system. They theorize about it. As Ely Devons, an English economist, once said in a meeting: 'If economists wanted to study the horse, they wouldn't go around and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, `What would I do if I were a horse?' '”

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Author:Ronald Coase
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“This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.”

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Author:Howard Nemerov
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“Those who advocate more and more government regulation have been experimenting for 40 years, trying to create an economic system in which everyone can somehow be made more prosperous by the toil of someone else.”

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Book:Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan
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“If capitalism worked as the socialists think an economic system ought to work, and provided a constant equality of living conditions for all, regardless of whether a man was able or not, resourceful or not, diligent or not, thrifty or not, if capitalism put no premiums on resourcefulness and effort and not penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only an equality of destitution.”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“Capitalism, the ogre of those protesting Wall Street, has suffered a public relations crisis in the wake of the global economic collapse. But any remedy to the systemic corruption that led to the collapse should not displace recognition that capitalism creates wealth. Capitalism, and no other economic system, has raised millions from poverty around the world.”

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Author:Kathleen Parker
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“Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.”

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Author:Charlie Munger
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“The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms.”

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Author:Charlie Munger
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“A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.”

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Author:Pope Francis
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“Our values are defined by what we will tolerate when it is done to others. Everyone's sense of virtue is degraded by the present reality. A revolutionary principle is embedded in the global economic system, awaiting broader recognition: Human dignity is indivisible. Across the distances of culture and nations, across vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, even the least among us are entitled to dignity, and no justification exists or brutalizing them in the pursuit of commerce.”

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Author:William Greider
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“My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet.”

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Author:Kirkpatrick Sale
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“There is one bit of advice given us by the ancient Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest - what we call investment - is the basis of our whole system.”

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Book:The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics
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“China reformed its state sector before, in the late 1990s. Tens of millions were laid off at the time. That was scary and we had warnings of social unrest. But it did not happen. Instead, there was a restructuring in our economic system. I am not sure if China will follow a Western playbook in this respect.”

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Author:Zhang Xin
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“The final goal of world revolution is not socialism, or even communism, it is not a change in the present economic system, it is not the destruction of civilization in a material sense. The revolution desired by the leaders is moral and spiritual, it is an anarchy of ideas in which all the bases established nineteen centuries ago shall be overthrown, all the honored traditions trodden under foot, and, above all, the Christian ideal finally obliterated.”

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Author:Leon V. DePoncins
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“The nature of the state is one thing, but there are other major challenges - what it will take to tackle the issues of social corruption, for example, social justice, and the economic system - and what are the future challenges when it comes to equality between the citizens, in particular in the field of the job market and equal opportunity for men and for women? This is at the centre of the question that is the Arab Awakening.”

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Author:Tariq Ramadan
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“When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that "real wealth." It exposes what's wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.”

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Author:Michael Hudson
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“This is a very important issue that the corporate media chooses not to talk about a whole lot, that we have an economic system which is rigged, which means that at the same time as the middle class of this country is disappearing, almost all of the new income and wealth in America is going to the top 1 percent. You have the top one-tenth of 1 percent owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent - 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.”

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Author:Bernie Sanders
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“There God tells us exactly what is going to happen and scripture tells us that there is going to come a world leader who will initially bring overtures of peace. He will help the Jewish people rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. He will have a new economic system where you don't buy or sell without his mark. Initially, for some, it will look like a good deal because there will be peace, as I said.”

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Author:Greg Laurie
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