My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten.
Audrey HepburnThere has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War.
Noam ChomskyThe answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.
Jordan PetersonThe general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.
Bill GatesThere are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.
Bill GatesThe idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.
Bill GatesFrom 1945 to 1974, the Western world – including America – was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.
Robert KiyosakiCapital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Karl MarxTo be safe at the expense of the liberty of other people is a difficult equation.
Madeleine AlbrightThe 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.
Vivienne WestwoodI think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.
Dolores HuertaWell, yeah, people are working in our country. You know what? They’re working two and three jobs, and in our America, people should not have to work more than one job to be able to put food on the table and have a roof over their head.
Kamala HarrisCapitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
George Bernard ShawI just feel like, with rappers, there’s so much complacency. It’s like, ‚Oh, I’m a rapper. I’m successful. I make money. That’s all that matters.‘ But there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. Whether or not you’re aware of it, it’s happening.
J. ColeI think whenever something is – whenever there’s something that affects the public good, then there does need to be some form of public oversight.
Elon MuskStates are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
Noam ChomskyPhilanthropy should be voluntary.
Bill GatesThe conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time – 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn’t have toilets in the fields; they didn’t have cold drinking water. They didn’t have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.
Dolores HuertaI’m a singer, not a politician, and I think you don’t want the two to get confused. It’s not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.
BonoIn the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.
Thich Nhat HanhThere is a moral obligation that those who have should give to those who don’t.
Audrey HepburnI think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.
Kurt VonnegutSome 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.
Winston ChurchillIn 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.
George Bernard ShawI don’t think any country is perfect. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don’t like. I think that’s part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.
Tom BradyNobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.
Bill GatesChina adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.
Bill GatesPolitics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.
David HareA wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
Thomas JeffersonWhole new businesses will emerge around breakthrough products as revolutionary technologies accelerate capitalism’s creative destruction of slower industries.
Robert KiyosakiCapitalism 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.
Thomas SowellAny religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.
Martin Luther King, Jr.While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
Karl MarxI had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.
George W. BushI’m pro Union.
J. K. RowlingCapitalism 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.
Martin Luther King, Jr.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.
Alice WalkerThe rise in the price of gold is a sign that capitalism has stumbled.
Robert KiyosakiPhilanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI 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.
Fidel CastroCapitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.
Bill GatesIt is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
Noam ChomskyWhen you work as a humanitarian, you are conscious that politics have to be considered. Because if you really want to make an extreme change, then you have a responsibility.
Angelina JolieAn important priority for me is a business must get their own house in order. Be or become an agent of positive change in your own enterprise and adopt responsible practices to eliminate the risks that often lie at the root of inequality and poverty.
Richard BransonCapitalism 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.
Richard BransonI did have two dads; one was a socialist, and one was a capitalist. I really decided I would rather be a capitalist.
Robert KiyosakiI consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.
Alice WalkerYou 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.
Bill GatesI find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.
Fidel CastroWe 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.
Barack ObamaSocialism 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.
George Bernard ShawThey talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
Fidel CastroGuilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.
John LennonA true capitalist doesn’t have a job, because other people and other people’s money work for them.
Robert KiyosakiSeek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.
Albert SchweitzerYou may be rich, but there is one thing you can’t afford – that is, if you are a good sort – you can’t afford to spend money on your own luxuries while there are people around you wanting the necessaries of life.
Robert Baden-PowellIt is hard to be an individual in Japan.
Haruki MurakamiWe had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.
Dolores HuertaMany people have an intense feeling about what they’re best at. Too often, they’re driven away from it by other people.
Robert Greene