Alan Greenspan Quotes

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken.

The thing about Occupy is that the sentiment the movement embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share.

When we are not extracting wealth from nature, we are extracting it from the working and middle classes.

Am I a capitalist? No. Why would I be a capitalist? I have no capital. Most people have no capital. But to punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We're responsible for changing it, yes. But we can't actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.

I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.

Thus I came to condemn capitalism, not through any oppression endured by me personally, but through that very deification of efficiency which capitalism had taught me, for its own purposes.

Feudalism is an economic system where a few people own all the land and the others have no option but to be serfs on such a feudal estate. We now condemn feudalism. We condemn not merely the feudal lords but we condemn the whole structure of rules that sustained feudalism. I am asking people to think similarly about the world economy.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

I think neoliberalism is vulnerable to protest. And it's under protest because people are beginning to realize that these austerity policies are really market-driven policies designed to punish the poor, the working classes, and the middle classes by simply distributing wealth upwards.

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

The Democrats tell all the poor people and all of the middle class that they're only where they are 'cause the rich have cheated them, exploited them, or stolen all their money. The way they're gonna make it equal is to take from those people who have just won life's lottery, the premise being that the poor and the rich and the middle class are gonna get the money.

At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.

We do not yet have a politics that is equal to the economics around us.

It's not class warfare to talk about fairness.

Your life doesn't change one way for the better when the Democrats start punishing the rich. In fact, every time you hear the Democrats start talking about standing up for the little guy, look out because it's the little guy that gets creamed.

I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.

The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

We are giving away the country so a few very rich people can get richer.

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

The worldview of the Left is a battle between rich and poor

[The Democrats] will say that the Reagan administrtion has given benefits to the rich at the expense of the poor - a term that they define broadly to include middle-income people, women, minorities, the aged, the young, farmers, steelworkers, and others.

Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

There are too many people trying to take opportunity from people in the middle class.

It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it "greed" to want to keep what you have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and let politicians use it to buy votes.