Adam Curtis Quotes

The political system is not for the people. The people are secondary to the economy. It's about what generates money, not about what benefits the people.

I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

People have been savaged by a predatory economic and political system, and some are turning to Trump. Unfortunately, Trump is just more of the same.

I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.

Since the crash of 2008 and during the neoliberal retrenchment known as austerity, many commentators have muttered that the left is dead, watching social democrats in their timidity lose elections and respond by becoming ever more timid and neoliberal. They deserve their defeats.

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

For now, capitalism is working to produce more money but does not see the people. This problem is getting worse across the world.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don't care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the '99 percent.'

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

In America power comes in the form of law and money.

The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its greatest danger.

Many will see [globalization] as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.

In time the Democratic party will fade away and we will have a capitalistic party and a socialistic party.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

Many on the right confuse the "is" of globalization with the "ought" of simply accepting all its effects. They preach a political quietism that is really just a cloak for greed.

America’s super-elite has been particularly effective at using the tools of a political democracy to protect its minority privilege.

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets.