David Harvey Quotes

Corporations and financiers have used their growing influence to induce governments and international organizations to construct a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximize their rental income.

Here in Davos, it is generally assumed that there is now only one god - the market.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

To develop political and economic power in a capitalist society, you need capital.

I believe wealth should be in the hands of those who know how to create more wealth.

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital.

In a capitalist society all institutions are in danger of control by the counting room.

The collectivizations and socializations in the economy count for nothing when State power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

We saw that the free market economy was not enough when the Harvard boys failed to deliver free market capitalism to Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

Fundamentally all social and political questions are economic.

Unevenness of economic and political development is the inflexible law of capitalism.

I am on the anti-imperialist left. The Stalinist left? I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; … If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.

Why was it, if you were a wealthy European industrialist in the 19th century, you would also most likely be a Protestant. There had been a shift of economic power from Catholic Countries like Italy and Spain towards Protestant countries like England and Germany? It seemed as if there were some kind of connection between the content of your faith—the form of your worship and your economic fortunes… What was it about Protestantism that made people not only work harder but save and accumulate capital?

When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.

Capital has never been circumcised by state boundaries …. The welfare of … electorates depends on capitalism. The reverse is not always the case. Capital can relocate elsewhere; electorates cannot.

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

In antiquity, agriculture and industry depended completely on human labor; but now, with the development of natural forces that human labor cannot match, agriculture and industry have fallen completely into the hands of the capitalists. The greater the amount of capital, the more abundant the resources that can be utilized.

The world is moving in a completely fascist, corporate direction. It worries me, it should worry us all.

The difference between capitalism and feudalism is that under capitalism, they make money directly through wages, manufacturing, and commerce and under feudalism, it's directly through juro-political means.

Three hundred men, who all know each other direct the economic destinies of the Continent and they look for successors among their friends and relations. This is not the place to examine the strange causes of this strange state of affairs which throws a ray of light on the obscurity of our social future.

That's not to say they [Bill and Hillary Clinton] intend to be corrupt, but I think they're way too cozy with the economic elite, and we know that our political system exemplifies the power of the economic elite.

The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.