quotes by Economist Quotes

“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”

“Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.”

“It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.”

“Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.”

“In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”

“No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?”

“Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.”

“The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.”

“Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem.”

“Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.”

“Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.”

“What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.”

“Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.”

“Misery motivates, not utopia.”

“Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”

“The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.”

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

“Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far.”

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it”

“Ideas do not exist separately from language.”

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

“Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply: happen: to people, rather than be being caused by their own choices and behavior. Thus there is said to be an 'epidemic' of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people catch just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.”

“Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

“In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

“If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one's back on hum suffering and look after one's own skin.”

“An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.”

“However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.”

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

“In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.”

“I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.”

“All statements are true, if you are free to redefine their terms.”

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.”

“All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.”

“The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.”

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

“Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.”

“The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.”

“Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.”

“There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.”

“Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.”

“The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.”

“When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.”

“Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.”

“A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.”

“The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value .”

“An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”

“Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.”

“Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.”