Dalai Lama Quotes

Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?

In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.

There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from?

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

The more wants a man has, the less freedom.

The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

My whole thing in life is I just want freedom. I thought that money would give me that freedom. I was wrong. It bound me more than it freed me, because now I had more things to worry about, more people asking for money, I thought I had to buy a house and nice cars and different things that people with money are supposed to do.

Money gives you the freedom to do with your time what you want to do with it

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

People understand that the economy is rigged. They're working longer hours for low wages. All new income and wealth, almost all, is going to the people on top.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

So, make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life.

What neo-capitalism does so brilliantly is that it's always subdividing and dividing, so that people are never able to be joined in their numbers and strength in a unified way. That is exactly what we have to overcome.

A Society in which the people's wants do not exceed their possessions is not a Socialist society.

Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other 90 percent of the people?"

Feudalism is an economic system where a few people own all the land and the others have no option but to be serfs on such a feudal estate. We now condemn feudalism. We condemn not merely the feudal lords but we condemn the whole structure of rules that sustained feudalism. I am asking people to think similarly about the world economy.

Money is a topic that touches all races, all religions, all sexes, all ages, all tax brackets. It's a universal language that truly has been held up to us in society as a thing that determines whether we are successful, worthy, whether we have contributed something to life or not.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

We are people with lives, not consumers with lifestyles.

Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out