Marc Reisner Quotes

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

The smaller the office, the more power individuals with big money have.

And, you know, money is - the money edge is really dangerous to democracy. Because what you have right now - people have said to me that, look, you'll always be outspent, so how can you ever win?

Rich people are powerful in wealth but few in votes.

“Never again” doesn’t reckon with money’s ability to erase memory.

Capitalism has put democracy in trouble, because capitalism has tried to persuade us that being a private consumer is enough. That a citizen is nothing more than a consumer

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.

The invectives against capital in the hands of those who have it are double-faced, and when turned about are nothing but demands for capital in the hands of those who have it not, in order that they may do with it just what those who have it now are doing with it.

The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

You know it's funny, when it rains it pours they got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.

There is nothing that robs a righteous cause of its strength more than a millionaire's money.

I live my life through the prism of capitalism and physiological limits and eventualities.

But it is pretty to see what money will do.

The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.

Nobody should be hitting lotto for 36 million dollars when we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson, or whoever should have thousands, millions, billions of dollars and we got people broke with two-three jobs and still can't pay bills on time. There's no way! No way these people should have planes when people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!!!

Instead of concentrating on the war against poverty, global attention is focused on another kind of slaughter - on something that is intangible and yet being tackled by all the possible military means we can muster. And all the lofty declarations by world leaders about combatting poverty that were lauded by the General Assembly turned out to be damp squibs.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

I think our biggest problem in society is we're headed more and more toward a two-tiered society. That is, creating welfare for the wealthy and destroying opportunities for the disadvantaged.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

Those who satisfy the wants of a smaller number of people only collect fewer votes-dollars-than those who satisfy the wants of more people.

We know that a peaceful world cannot long exist, one-third rich and two-thirds hungry.

What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.