Alexander Berkman Quotes

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

No one seems to care for anything but about money today. Nothing is held of account except the bank accounts. Quality, education, civic distinction, public virtue seem each year to be valued less and less.

… the spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism

The worship of Mammon may be vulgar or immoral, but it persists while other religions falter and disappear.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.

The moral problem of our day is concerned with the love of money, with the habitual appeal to the money motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life…

A quarter of a century ago, we were crazy about politics. Now we are crazy about making money …. I am afraid that one day we will become money hooligans without culture.

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.

The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.

The age is dull and mean. Men creep, Not walk; with blood too pale and tame To pay the debt they owe to shame; Buy cheap, sell dear; eat. drink, and sleep down-pillowed, deaf to moaning want; Pay tithes for soul-insurance; keep Six days to Mammon, one to Cant

Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Greed can be very dangerous because you sacrifice your soul for the sake of something material, and then you start sacrificing people in order to keep that which is material.

God did not die; he was transformed into money

No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency.

There is no idol more debasing than the worship of money.

Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others-the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.

The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.

The worst enslaving trait of all is greed. I rail against the substitution of money for worth. The idea that the endless accumulation of dead money can furnish a meaningful life to sold-out souls is the supreme lie offered by the system of free enterprise.

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.

In America, money takes the place of God.

When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.