Joan Robinson Quotes

Capitalism had been more revolutionary than any previous social system. It had swept away without scruples old institutions and modes of thought, if they were found to stand in its way.

A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values sweep into every aspect of human endeavor. It is a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

Present day American capitalism—for all our misgivings about it—at least leaves room for free institutions to flower and survive.

In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

For now, capitalism is working to produce more money but does not see the people. This problem is getting worse across the world.

In countries operating a largely capitalist system, there does not appear to be a wide understanding among its actors and overseers of either its advantages or its hazards.

Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.

The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its greatest danger.

The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists—they're too greedy.

Capitalism is very unfair but it is the only system that works.

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses.

Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.

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

Capitalism is destroying the world.

I don't have anything against corporate America. I mean, I guess there's something about living in a capitalist society that can get kind of terrifying at times.

Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

Capitalism is in crisis.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

Right now people seem to be very tentative about the positive benefits of capitalism.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.

Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

I used to think that capitalism was human nature. Now I know that it is culture.

The land of the capitalists…