Albert Camus Quotes

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

Understanding capitalism is in some ways simple. At its best, capitalism rewards creators, makers and providers: the people and firms that create valuable things for others, like imaginative technologies and good food, cars and drugs.

The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production.

Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.

Without a consumer society there was no need for an industrial revolution.

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook.

The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

Capitalism does a number of things very well: it helps create an entrepreneurial spirit; it gets people motivated to come up with new ideas, and that's a good thing.

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn't another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.

Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.

Modern capitalism is masterful at producing services people don't need and in large part probably don't want. It is brilliant at convincing people that they do need and want them. But it has difficulty turning itself to the production of those services which people really do need. Not only that, it often spends an enormous amount of time and effort convincing people that those services are either unrealistic, marginal or counterproductive.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

Capitalism is based on a kind of inherited moral climate.

Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.

The main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial life.

A premodern society, a preindustrial society, is one where people wake up whenever they want, there’s a lot of work but that isn’t set off from leisure…. A modern society is one where the bells ring at a certain time and we move from one place to another and people just become parts of a machine which has a very well thought out, pre-thought out way of working.

In the twentieth century, the essence of man is not that he is a rational, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking animal, but that he is an industrial animal. It is not his moral or intellectual or social or aesthetic ... attributes which make man what he is. His essence resides in his capacity to contribute to, and to profit from, industrial society. The emergence of industrial society is the prime concern of sociology.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

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

American business is not a monster, but an expression of God-given impulse to create, and the savior of our happiness.

The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.

Although capitalism is, in principle, strongly individualistic, it has contributed in practice to reinforce the trend to integration, because it has made our lives more and more interdependent.