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

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

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

The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.

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.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

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 only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

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

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

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

I know the Federal Reserve Bank can continue to print more and more money… but city and state governments cannot.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Even people on the liberal side are starting to worry about going off a fiscal cliff.

To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world’s strongest economy.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

And what’s interesting, and I don’t think a lot of Americans understand this fact, is that, one, most new jobs are created by small businesses; two, most small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax, or many small businesses pay tax there.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

When you bring in multi-brand retail items into the country, you’re not just bringing the products, but you’re also harming local manufacturers.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.

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

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Until we have comprehensive financial education, we’ll never see the end of our booms and busts.

Trust is central to an economy that works.

Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That’s a statement in and of itself.

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

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.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

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.

It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

In the middle of a recession, where we’re just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.

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.

The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of the recession because that would just suck up and take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.

I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

Pricey oil makes clear that wealth really is energy in various forms.

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

The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

When I was born, the economy wasn’t in a great state; it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.

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.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

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

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they’re learned to do more with less, and so they don’t hire.