When I went into the business, I sat down and figured that I was indeed one of fortune’s children. Just think. There were 20 million buffalo, each worth at least $3 — $60 million. At...

For guns and ammunition,” says I.

…all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the...

She looked at her note cards and took a breath. “Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald’s. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France,...

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects;...

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there’s such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we’ve been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be...

The United States has never done away with slavery; we just stopped calling it such. These days, we call it free-market capitalism.

Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that.

Big companies are reliant on institutional investors on a punishing schedule which leads to ruthless behaviour. This form of capitalism with this structure and incentives will never deliver sustainability.

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to...

Paradise, the capitalists promise, is right around the corner. True, mistakes have been made such as the Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of the European working class, but we have learned our lesson and...

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it’s exactly the opposite.

Money is sacred as everyone knows… So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form...

…capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism –...

Nearly every “serious” anarchist writer in recent years has tried to distance anarchism from chaos. Yet for most ordinary people, chaos and anarchy are forever linked. The connection between chaos and anarchism should be rethought...

Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state...

But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn’t the “exercise explosion” and the “new fitness revolution” have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity?

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost...

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its...

It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less...

so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.

You know you are capitalism’s ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom.

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical...

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or...

A time of ongoing cultural revolution when the adversaries of Christianity have made plain their intent to use the state machinery to promote radical social ideologies hardly seems an opportune moment to discuss how the...

I don’t want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

For anyone who thinks “profit” is evil, I have a challenge for you: try NOT to get any profit in the next week. Profit simply means increasing how much valuable stuff you have, and if...

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.

You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter’s place was, and I looked across it and...

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which...

The essence of modern capitalism is not slavery of the antique pattern but the possession of the expensive tools of production by a small plutocratic group which controls frequently the tools of persuasion.

What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are...

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not...

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

If you can’t afford the good food or if you can’t afford health care or if you don’t have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can’t get it fixed and you...

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He...

Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief – in the sense of inner subjective attitude – at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior....

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I...

America runs on credit darling. Why do you worry, our credit will take care of this payment. It is not saving or cash in hand that matters. We do not need cash, we just need...

Within two or three years of World War II’s end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depend on it. Why? To create...

As for wealth, we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful indictments of capitalism is...

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in...

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that...

There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn’t capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre.

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial...

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing:...

Traditional hedonism…was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent...

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.