Roger Cohen Quotes

Market systems all threaten the continued existence of those who are currently successful if they fail to adapt to changes they do not control. This tension is essential to markets serving human well-being better than other economic systems. But at the same time it means that organizations within them have interests at cross-purposes to the system itself. This is true for all spontaneous orders: markets, science, and democracies.

Free trade would place our farmers and workers in competition with peasant and sweated labor products.

We must create a kind of globalization that works for everyone... and not just for a few.

Greed and globalization aren't just America's fault.

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires!

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.

This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy.

If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.

Right now people seem to be very tentative about the positive benefits of capitalism.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.

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.

The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values.

The government may change faces from time to time, but it's not like we fight wars for democracy - we fight wars for capitalism and for oil.

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

We need a government that does not give in to a globalist agenda, an agenda I am now convinced seeks to bring American as a sovereign nation and the middle class to their knees.

We know that social exclusion is closely tied to the new economic world order, globalized, with free and open markets, which isn't bringing prosperity or social justice to all.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade, and democratic politics.

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.