Sunday, October 26, 2014 – When Capitalism Stalls
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. ~ Oscar Wilde
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. ~ Jane Austen
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. ~ Charles Dickens
There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income. ~ Edmund Wilson
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. ~ Samuel Butler
Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense. ~ Max Frisch
The poor tread lightest on the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and the more havoc we wreak. ~ Paul Harrison
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality. ~ George Bernard Shaw
It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. ~ Aeschylus
We have become ninety-nine-percent money-mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts. ~ George Washington Carver
A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income. ~ Lord Chesterfield
I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. ~ e. e. cummings
Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge. ~ George William Curtis
Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too? ~ Bill Veeck
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. ~ Errol Flynn
On my income tax 1040 it says “Check this box if you are blind.” I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away. ~ Tom Lehrer
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. ~ Henry David Thoreau
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. ~ D. H. Lawrence
What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? ~ Mark Twain
I cannot afford to waste my time making money. ~ Louis Agassiz
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either. ~ Robert Graves
When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart. ~ John Wesley
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~ Woody Allen
I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves. ~ Joe Louis
Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. ~ John Maynard Keynes
The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm – capitalism is that kind of a system. ~ Milton Friedman
Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class. ~ Al Capone
Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. ~ Eugene V. Debs
A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. ~ Howard Scott
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Worldwide capitalism kills more people every day then Hitler did. And he was crazy. ~ Ken Livingstone
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. ~ Bertrand Russell
Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy. ~ David Korten
Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way. ~ David Korten
Capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. ~ Joseph A. Schumpeter
If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women. ~ Christopher Hampton
Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. ~ Pat Robertson
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. ~ Milton Friedman
Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes. ~ Oswald Spengler
In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. ~ Fran Lebowitz
There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants. ~ Mao Tse-Tung
The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression. ~ Felix Frankfurter
Capitalism is what people do if you leave them alone. ~ Kenneth Minogue
The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. ~ Albert Einstein
If you like capitalism, you will positively love depressions, because they are one and the same, like manic-depressives and their cycles, like spouse-abusers and their storms of violence. ~ Kenneth Smith
Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. ~ Frank Borman
Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. ~ Orson Scott Card
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. ~ Michael Pollan
There is hardly anything in the world that some man can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey. ~ John Ruskin
When we truly discover love, capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary. ~ Will O’Brien
Just Above Sunset 