Terry Eagleton Quotes

Capitalists make money by exploiting labor and by externalizing the costs of the wastes produced by the productive process by imposing the wastes on the environment.

The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

Free enterprise really means rich people getting richer: they have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth

It is said that our indigenous ancestors, Mayas and Aztecs, made human sacrifices to their gods. It occurs to me to ask: How many humans have been sacrificed to the gods of Capital in the last five hundred years?

Stockholders are used to a certain kind of global capitalism. This version is very hard on the environment and very hard on people below a certain fiscal level. It is a calculated, systematic weakening of people. Many labour, a few benefit. Try talking about cleaning up the place with these people. The hostility is incredible.

West Africa today is just a quarry of paving stones for Hell, and those stones were cemented in place with

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.

Capitalism is a cancer in the biosphere.

Capitalists are generating death.

Get up in one of our industrial centers today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in.

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

Capitalism is destroying the world.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.

Water is not free anymore. Our resources were free at one time, but now they are not. Everything is getting controlled by big corporations. I'm most worried about this.

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.

I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment.

The unambigious fact is that U.S. capitalism is a mechanism for looting the many for the benefit of the few.

Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism.

People who work in diamonds and in oil wreck a lot of the Earth and a lot of the people on it.

The time has come for everybody -capitalists, communists, socialists- to ask themselves what 'civilization' really means. If not, whether a country calls itself capitalist or communists, in the pursuit of 'progress' , it will visit genocide either on its own people or on another people whose country must be plundered for resources to feed the Progress industry.

God, how patient are Thy poor! These corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion, and then exacting from the contributors-to whom a little means so much-a double share to guard the treasure!

It’s the end. It’s the end of the civilization. We’re going down. No, it’s sure not too attractive. Lenticels. I just hope my kids don’t live to see the last days. The things burning and people living in cellars. Violet. The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.

Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society.