David Graeber Quotes

Everything has changed in recent decades - the economy, technology, cultural attitudes, the demographics of the workforce, the role of women in society and the structure of the American family. It's about time our laws caught up. We watch 'Modern Family' on television, but we're still living by 'Leave It To Beaver' rules.

… post-industrial society

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

A new forum is needed that reflects the realities of today's globalised world and the rising importance of emerging markets.

We Need a RESET IN THE WAY THE ECONOMY GROWS Around the World

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution.

One thing, change, is what everyone says. The question is, what type of change? What's the right change to produce a different outcome for the people left behind by globalization?

The overall effect of the rise of the industrial system is greatly to reduce the union as a social force. But it will not disappear or become entirely unimportant.

in the comparatively short time between my childhood and my daughter's, the business society has ceased urging people to produce and is now exerting its very considerable influence to get them to consume.

Now women in comedy is a trendy topic, and people are hungering for women's voices in a way that they haven't before.

Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.

Acknowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead. Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn't at the heart of being human until very recently. We've been culturally brainwashed.

The economy in the next 20 to 25 years is going to change more than they did in the last 20, 25 years. And that's because exponential trends are affecting a bigger and bigger share of the economy. So we have some huge disruptions in store, and I can't predict exactly what the innovations are going to be. If I did, I would have already invented them. But I think they'll be comparable to the innovations we saw in the past 20, 25 years if not greater.

Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.

We change by changing our consciousness and by saying, money should not be a commodity. Money should be a means to an end.

Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no indsturial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.

Social change really cannot happen unless people are willing to take a risk, and they were. And I was so moved by that, and of course by the way that he spoke, that made a huge dent in my belief system and my spirit.

Deindustrialization that I have written about for 40 years left a good part of the American public behind.

The desire for hope and change is easily understandable. In many ways it's even more dramatic in Europe.

The world is continually changing. I think in some ways it's changing in a very positive way.

Paradise is at your own center; unless you find it there, there is no way to enter.

The women are very important too, we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority.

When I grew up in Seattle, by the way, in the 70's, it was a fishing village. There were loggers and fishers and my dad had a sewer company and it wasn't the way Seattle is now. Culturally, it was very different back then.

We have been in the process of reprogramming men and the way they are raised for a long time.

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.