"Capitalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production—by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Revolution just as soon as we're educated up to it," he was wont to declare. "If we get it before then, it'll be a worse hash than capitalism. So ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the like taint that accompanied its rise, and also clings to its development. For one, I hold that the smut of capitalist conditions, that to-day clings to monogamy, is as avoidable an "incident" in the evolutionary process as are the iniquities of capitalism that to-day are found the accompaniment of co-operative labor;—and the further the parallel is pursued through the many ramifications of the subject, the closer will it be discovered to hold. For one, I hold that the monogamous family—bruised and wounded in the cruel rough-and-tumble of modern ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... to see Travis and report on his work. The candidate was waiting anxiously at his hotel after a big political mass meeting on the East Side, at which capitalism and the bosses had been hissed to the ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... Capitalism and the Wage System III: Pitfalls in Socialism IV: Individual Liberty and Public Control ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... observe—that just in so far as a man's earnings or income are taken from him in the form of taxation, you are already in a state of socialism. That is to say, to that extent is his income taken from him and administered by the state. This is an observation most unwelcome to the opponents of capitalism, so-called, who resent the conclusion that if the State and Federal governments are already taking forty per cent. of his income from him, a state of perfect socialism could do no more than take the other sixty per cent. This whole problem of taxation, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... adopted a new calendar, in which the year will commence on October 25th. We ourselves have always, associated the first day of January with some of the most repugnant features of capitalism. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... has confounded the gloomy prophets—at home and abroad who predicted the downfall of American capitalism. The people of the United States, going their own way, confident in their own powers, have achieved the greatest prosperity the world ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... an historical fact as well as a psychological one that you do not get rid of traits or institutions except as you replace them with something of positive service, or greater competitive value. The institution of capitalism exists not because of its predatory character, but because in spite of its exploitation it promotes industry, and labor and other industrial technicians do not. As our industrial institutions ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... economic supremacy of the North over the South and the West. In The Great Frontier (Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe—a frontier that brought about the rise of democracy and capitalism and that, now vanished as a frontier, foreshadows the vanishment ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... country gentlemen and city merchants; as one might know from the "constitution" they had adopted—one of the greatest barriers to human progress ever devised. And so with the Civil War, which to Darrell was one of the deeds of the newly-risen monster of Capitalism. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... termination of his speech, but it was obvious from some of the men's faces that they resented Grinder's remarks. These men ridiculed Socialism and regularly voted for the continuance of capitalism, and yet they were disgusted and angry with Grinder! There was also a small number of Socialists—not more than half a dozen altogether—who did not join in the applause. These men were all sitting at the end of the long table presided over ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... any change in political institutions. This new doctrine was eagerly adopted by the rich, who were thus enabled to argue that Nature intended that the masses should find no room at her feast; and that therefore our system of industrial capitalism was in harmony with the Will of God. Most comforting dogma! Most excellent anodyne for conscience against acceptance of those rights of man that, being ignored, found terrible expression in the French Revolution! Without discussion, without investigation, and without ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... visitors whose skins do not happen to be white. And as the older colonialism recedes, and the neo-colonialism of the Communist powers stands out more starkly than ever, they realize more clearly that the issue in the world struggle is not communism versus capitalism, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in a rebellion; that he was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police; that he wrote revolutionary pamphlets; and that his picture of Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels's Condition of the Laboring classes in England. They frantically deny these facts, and then declare that I have connected them with Wagner in ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... for social consecration; and its machinery of service all at hand to be shifted from the gear of [10] charity to the gear of justice. Why not stay, therefore, in the church, as Theodore Parker stayed, and fight capitalism, as he fought slavery, in the garb of ...
— A Statement: On the Future of This Church • John Haynes Holmes
... Lancashire children, the modern city and city slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new industrial poverty that lay in the shadow ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... life, and then take note of the necessary place that particular classes of business men must hold in the structure of our society. I, for my part, look upon this last century of economic progress,—under the sway of what is often called "capitalism" as a term of reproach,—as an immeasurable boon to mankind. It began with the practical utilization of several great inventions, notably that of steam power, which broke up the old household and village industries, gave us the modern factory system, and along with the development of railroads ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... Workers in Massachusetts, 1912; Railwaymen in England, 1919, in France, 1920.] It regards the State as fixed, rigid, and intellectual, and adopts all the Bergsonian anathemas it can find which condemn intellectual constructions, concepts, and thought in general. Its war-cry is not only "Down with Capitalism" but also, in a great number of cases, "Down with Intellectualism"! Instinct and impulse alone are to be guides. Syndicalism, unlike Socialism, has no programme—it does not believe in a prearranged plan. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Labour is freed — or rather when once it frees itself — from the thraldom, of the old Feudal system, and finally from the fearful burden of modern Capitalism — when once it can lift its head and see the great constructive vision of the new society which awaits it — then surely it will perceive that all the great qualities we have named as exhibited in the past in the old destructive Warfare, and now become the splendid heritage of the peoples of Europe, ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... Meaning of Hebraism." Mrs. E. F. Nickoley, who has traveled extensively in Palestine, gave an interesting talk on the Jews in the Holy Land. Professor Simon Litman of our Faculty spoke on "Jews and Modern Capitalism." Professor E. C. Baldwin of our English department, in speaking on "Prayer," roused a lively interest in the question as to whether prayer is decadent among the Jews. Professor Albert H. Lybyer lectured on "Jews as the Transmitters of Culture from the Moslems to the Christians"; ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... England, the English colonies will throw themselves eagerly into the arms of America. Then will come America's turn, and, finally, it is quite likely that we shall all have to combine to overthrow the last stronghold of capitalism in some South African bourgeois republic. I can well imagine," he said, looking far away with his bright little eyes through the walls of the dark dining room, "that the working men's republics of Europe may have to have a ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... opposed to the ideal of the majority of the members of the legislatures. The fiction that representative assemblies will work for the general good is proclaimed with enthusiasm; but the moment we examine their actions we see it is not so, and we discover the cause. Where the nation is capitalist and capitalism is the dominant economic factor, legislatures invariably act to uphold it, and legislation tends to fix the system more securely. We see in Great Britain that wage-earners are now openly regarded by the legislatures as a class who must not be allowed the same freedom in life ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... containing a new treatment of the theory of value; but when at work on the classical theory of capital, I made a discovery which at once threw a ray of light into the obscurity that had until then made the practical realisation of the forms of social organisation impossible. I perceived that capitalism stops the growth of wealth, not—as Marx has it—by stimulating 'production for the market,' but by preventing the consumption of the surplus produce; and that interest, though not unjust, will nevertheless ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... first hand not only in our Church schools and in the struggle between our modern proprietary classes and the proletariat, but in the part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism, we can judge for ourselves whether the initiative came from above or below. My object here is not to argue the historical point, but simply to make our theatre critics ashamed of their habit of treating Britain as an intellectual void, and assuming that ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... several—are afraid of being subverted to statism, and those who have a highly developed government are afraid of anarchism. The socio-economic systems based on private ownership of property hate the very idea of socialism or communism, and vice versa, and those planets with state capitalism hate them both." ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... between the classes, Marx failed to recognize the deeper unity of the proletariat and the capitalist. Nineteenth century capitalism had in reality engendered and cultivated the very type of working class best suited to its own purpose—an inert, docile, irresponsible and submissive class, progressively incapable of effective and aggressive organization. Like ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Democracy may be referred for its source to the teachings of Louis Blanc, who formed in 1840 a workmen's society in Paris. Blanc held, as the Social Democrats hold, that capitalism was the cause of all social evil, and that the workman was powerless against it. He therefore proposed the establishment of workmen's societies for purposes of production, and the grant of the necessary ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... imitate them ever since. The orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a formless resentment by endowing ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... (umbrella organization for opposition groups); Ecoglenost, Podkrepa Independent Trade Union, Fatherland Front, Communist Youth Union, Central Council of Trade Unions, National Committee for Defense of Peace, Union of Fighters Against Fascism and Capitalism, Committee of Bulgarian Women, All-National Committee for Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship; Union of Democratic Forces, a coalition of about a dozen dissident groups; numerous regional and national interest ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was a symbol of him; it was some such thing that prevented him and his heirs from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He thrust again and ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton |
