Robert Wyatt Quotes

This is class war on an international scale, and power is in the hands of those who control the international economic system.

It is idle to attack Imperialism or Militarism as political expedients or policies unless the axe is laid at the economic root of the tree, and the classes for whose interest Imperialism works are shorn of the surplus revenues which seek this outlet.

Capitalism in its imperialistic stage is a system which regards war as a legitimate method for solution of international disputes - a method which is legitimate in fact if not legally so.

The culture of death is imposed by economic and political interests, the arrogance of power, corruption. I blame the first world for having taken our riches for so many years. I am speaking of the superpowers that dominate the life of the world. More concretely, the World Bank, the IMF. Those that have caused and tolerated the death of our people, those responsible for the plundering of the third world. Silence is also part of repression.

We denounce the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interest of financial imperialists, oil monopolists, and international bankers, which has at times degraded our State Department from its high service as a strong and kindly intermediary of defenseless governments to a trading outpost of those interest and concession seekers engaged in the exploitation of weaker nations, as contrary to the will of the American people, destructive of domestic development and provocative of war.

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might.

'The Deuce' takes a look at the remarkable paradigm of capitalism and labor: where money goes and how it's routed; who has power and who doesn't; who is exploited and who's not.

In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.

I think Putin has changed, for sure. He has changed over time and he has been emboldened by, whether it's true or not, the perception is that we've pulled back, so people do change and this is an example of that.

If you look at capitalism and patriarchy, they're both such hierarchical, competitive, oneupmanship systems. They've trained us all [to think] that power means having all the goods or having the most money or having the most attention or having the most fame. That's not the power that interests me. Actually, the deconstruction of that power is what interests me.

To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.

When I went to high school - that's about as far as I got - reading my U.S. history textbook, well, I got the history of the ruling class. I got the history of the generals and the industrialists and the presidents that didn't get caught. How 'bout you? I got all of the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people that created it.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

East India Company weren't an evil organization that went around deliberately oppressing people, but they were driven by profit, and how familiar is that now?

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.

One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters

The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few.

War in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them. So much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East.

The great powers claim that whatever they possess is theirs by right, but whatever we, the smaller countries possess is negotiable.

When the representatives of "Big Business" think of the people, they do not include themselves.

You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it's off to the fields.

This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.