Kirkpatrick Sale Quotes

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

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

Brazil was a capitalist society without capital.

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

This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.

The left hates capitalism, not because of freedom and liberty - although they do. But the primary they hate capitalism is that it is the most efficient engine to create wealth for the greatest number of people in a society that has ever been devised. Nobody's ever claimed it's perfect. Nobody's ever said it's flawless. But it's better than anything else out there, particularly anything left has to offer.

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

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.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.

Capitalism is the worst friend of humanity.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.

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.

It's not difficult in South Africa for the ordinary person to see the link between capitalism and racist exploitation, and when one sees the link one immediately thinks in terms of a socialist alternative.

Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality.

Property is theft.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

In a capitalist society, persons who create capital, like Michael Eisner, are given the staggering rewards.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

... the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France, before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last.

Capitalism is so successful economically that it creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Ours is a capitalist society. It is therefore inevitable that, in part- and I repeat- in part- we must address this goal of deracialisation within the context of the property relations characteristics of a capitalist economy.