Thus commerce, though in itself a moral nullity, has had a considerable influence in tempering the human mind....he trades with the same countries ...(that he) would have gone to war with.

Thomas Paine

“ ‘The greed that distorts their reason blinds them to the sin they commit in ruining the family, blinds them to the crime of betraying friends.

How can we ignore the wisdom of turning from this evil when we see the sin of family destruction, Krishna?

When the family is ruined, the timeless laws of family duty perish; and when duty is lost, chaos overwhelms the family.

Krishna, we have heard that a place in hell is reserved for men who undermine family duties.

I lament the great sin we commit when our greed for kingship and pleasures drives us to kill our kinsmen.’

Saying this in time of war, Arjuna slumped into the chariot and laid down his bow and arrows, his mind tormented by grief.”

Lord Krishna

"…conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind…

…one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change.”

F A Hayek

"In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy."

Fran Lebowitz

"The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree - and thus keeps the road open to man's most valuable attribute: the creative mind."

Ayn Rand

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Honore de Balzac

Wizard of Oz is good. The part about "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?"

Then he proceeds to go into the "mind cure" stuff of the late 1800s, all about blaming us and the failings of our minds for our economic troubles, nothing at all about concentrated wealth and "political capitalism" which built every railroad and natural resource, and industrial fortune in this country.

Fortunes which still form the basis of the war chest used against us the American people and citizens and our families by the corporate shareholder Reactionaries.

Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf

Now virtue may not always be its own reward, but in any case it is not usually bought and paid for at market rates.

Kenneth Arrow

Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

("I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude").

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 30 January 1787

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

Francisco d. Anconia's (Ayn Rand's) Money Speech in 'Atlas Shrugged'

The problem with capitalism is that companies are never satisfied with the profit they have. They always need for that profit to grow and grow.

Philip Traversa

"It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism."

Malcolm X

"Humanities education is the worst thing for an industrialist."

Andrew Carnegie

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)

Louis Brandeis

“Life Insurance trusts I consider sacred. To hazard the property of the dead & to lose the scanty earnings of fathers & husbands, who have toiled & saved that they may leave something to their families deprived of their care & the support of their labour, is to my mind the worst of crimes.” Robert E. Lee to J. Wilcox Brown 1868.

Robert E Lee

"What we suffer from today is an excess of education." Adolf Hitler 1938

Adolf Hitler

"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers" John D Rockefeller, founder National Education Board

J D Rockefeller

“Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true”

Polish Proverb [ http://thinkexist.com/quotation/under_capitalism_man_exploits_man-under_socialism/173198.html ]

“Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true”

Polish Proverb

This dialogue is from “Network” Paddy Chayefsky’s Academy award-winning 1976 screenplay; Jensen is the chairman of the company that owns the network that news anchorman Howard Beale works for. This scene can be found toward the end of the film, approx page 116-117 of the screenplay.

JENSEN
You have meddled with the primal
forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I
won't have it, is that clear?! You
think you have merely stopped a
business deal -- that is not the
case! The Arabs have taken billions
of dollars out of this country, and
now they must put it back. It is
ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is
ecological balance! You are an old
man who thinks in terms of nations
and peoples. There are no nations!
There are no peoples! There are no
Russians. There are no Arabs!
There are no third worlds! There is
no West! There is only one holistic
system of systems, one vast and
immense, interwoven, interacting,
multi-variate, multi-national
dominion of dollars! petro-dollars,
electro-dollars, multi-dollars!,
Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and
shekels! It is the international
system of currency that determines
the totality of life on this planet!
That is the natural order of things
today! That is the atomic,
subatomic and galactic structure of
things today! And you have meddled
with the primal forces of nature,
and you will atone! Am I getting
through to you, Mr. Beale?
(pause)
You get up on your little twenty-
one inch screen, and howl about America
and democracy. There is no
America. There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT and A T
and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide
and Exxon. Those are the nations of
the world today. What do you think
the Russians talk about in their
councils of state -- Karl Marx?
They pull out their linear
programming charts, statistical
decision theories and minimax
solutions and compute the price-cost
probabilities of their transactions
and investments just like we do. We
no longer live in a world of nations
and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The
world is a college of corporations,
inexorably deter- mined by the
immutable by-laws of business. The
world is a business, Mr. Beale! It
has been since man crawled out of
the slime, and our children, Mr.
Beale, will live to see that perfect
world in which there is no war and
famine, oppression and brutality --
one vast and ecumenical holding company, for
whom all men will work
to serve a common profit, in which
all men will hold a share of stock,
all necessities provided, all
anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused. And I have chosen you to
preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

Arthur Jensen, from the "Network" screenplay