Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

In the simplest terms, inflation occurs when there’s too much money in the system. On the flip side, deflation occurs when there are too few dollars in circulation.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.

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.

Socialists tend to want to pay people more money to do less work, and capitalists tend to want to provide better products at better prices.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.

I have a problem with too much money. I can’t reinvest it fast enough, and because I reinvest it, more money comes in. Yes, the rich do get richer.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

The environmentalists say capitalism is killing our oceans, air, land, and forests. Capitalists argue that they provide food, fuel, and building materials for a growing world.

Capitalism has proven to be the only system that works, but the problem with capitalism is that extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

A true capitalist doesn’t have a job, because other people and other people’s money work for them.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.

Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you’re just going to keep buying and selling things until there’s nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

The rise in the price of gold is a sign that capitalism has stumbled.

You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

I did have two dads; one was a socialist, and one was a capitalist. I really decided I would rather be a capitalist.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

From 1945 to 1974, the Western world – including America – was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.

Whole new businesses will emerge around breakthrough products as revolutionary technologies accelerate capitalism’s creative destruction of slower industries.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

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.

Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

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

There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.

Nothing in the world is irreversible, not even capitalism.

We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn’t do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.