David Graeber Quotes

What is price gouging and what is capitalism can sometimes be a fine line.

I think hard-core capitalism tends to commercialize everything.

I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.

Markets are not static entities that are 'intervened' in (for good or bad) but are outcomes of public and private interactions.

The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.

It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.

There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.

Capitalism is a pretty brutal place.

Rain didn't make things messy. People did that all on their own.

But there are many men-and women-who do things in a time of war that they wouldn't dream of doing in peacetime, and all for the common good.

Capitalism would self-destruct in no time. So the business classes have always demanded strong, straight intervention to protect the society from the destructive effects of market forces because they don't want everything destroyed.

Consume more than you need This is the dream Make you pauper Or make you queen I won't die lonely I'll have it all prearranged A grave that's deep and wide enough For me and all my mountains o'things

I had a dream I can buy my way to heaven.

Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.

If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

Within neoliberal narratives, the message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished.

Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.

When a person does something, it has the man or woman look about it. It drips with humanity. You can follow the logic of it and see the meaning behind it.

For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across--hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.

Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures.

People's lives are forever controlled by two emotions: fear and greed.

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.