Capital Quotes

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“Money is always eager and ready to work for anyone who is ready to employ it.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Human and intellectual capital may be the most important intangible assets.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Machinery which is not used is not capital.”
― Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value

“Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth.”
― Karl Marx

“Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.”
― W.G. Sebald

“Optimizing working capital management improves financial efficiency, enhances cash flow, and boosts overall profitability for companies.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till out political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich, - a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”
― Stephen Johnson Field

“Ideas without capital are like seeds without soil. It's capital that turns business potential into business productivity.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“The flow of financial capital dictates the rhythm of social progress.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“The role of soil in natural ecosystems shares striking similarities with the role of capital in economies. Just as soil serves as the vital resource underpinning natural ecosystems, capital is the foundational resource driving economic systems.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“In nature, capital is never stagnant. Capital exists in service to life - at all times. It's a medium of utility, not a souvineer. The capital in our portfolio should work in the same way.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Investing, The Permaculture Way: Mayflower-Plymouth's 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing

“B.R.I.C.S nations would be wise to adapt Permaculture Economics if they truly want to have societies where capital is maximally productive, and where the masses of people share in the wealth of that productivity of capital.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“rising income inequality. not for nothing did Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ become a New York Times bestseller. Piketty made the strong claim that the rate of return on capital was, in the absence of wars and revolutions, always likely to be higher than the rate of economic growth. the implication was simply that the already well-off, basically those with no shortage of capital, would steadily get richer”
― Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

“In the world of international finance, power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the gatekeepers of capital who hold the keys to the world's resources. Their decisions, shrouded in secrecy, have the ability to shape the destiny of nations, redefine the distribution of wealth and power.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“Believing in your dream enough to fund it yourself is the first step to greatness, setting the stage for the world to believe in it too”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Together we create the world we inhabit. Yet if any one of us tried to imagine a world we'd like to live in, who would come up with on exactly like the one that currently exists? We can all imagine a better world. Why can't we just create one? Why does it seem so inconceivable to just stop making capitalism? Of government? Or at the very least bad service providers and annoying bureaucratic red tape?”
― David Graeber, Bullshit jobs

“The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. ... The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers ...”
― Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League

“The Luddites knew exactly who owned the machinery they destroyed. They saw that automation is not a faceless phenomenon that we must submit to. And they were right: Automation is, quite often and quite simply, a matter of the executive classes locating new ways to enrich themselves.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The graver evils of the capitalist system all arise from its uneven distribution of power. The possessors of capital wield an influence quite out of proportion to their numbers or their services to the community. They control almost the whole of education and the press; they decide what the average man shall know or not know”
― Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell

“Permaculture economics is a new and novel sustainable framework that integrates permaculture principles with capitalist fundamentals. It prioritizes wealth cultivation, ecological harmony, sustainability, and efficient capital use, encouraging businesses to operate ethically and responsibly. This approach seeks a balance between economic growth, wealth equity, and environmental sustainability, promoting a regenerative and harmonious economic system.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“Activism over profit. Character over capital.”
― Sai Marie Johnson

“Success in business isn't guaranteed because you started big. It is guaranteed only if you know exactly what you have ventured into.”
― Utibe Samuel Mbom, Your Clients and You

“—El dinero. ¿Qué es el dinero? Bienes de consumo en forma de pura fantasía. —Un asentimiento solemne de la cabeza, el ceño repentinamente fruncido, un suspiro-. No me gustan los marxistas, ya lo sabes. Ni su Estado ni su dictadura. Ni su forma de hablar, con esas explicaciones en bloque, reduciendo el mundo a un argumento único. Igual que la religión. No, no me gustan los marxistas. Pero Marx... —Y volvía a poner aquella cara, como si lo estuviera torturando una visión demasiado hermosa—. Tenía razón en una cosa. El dinero es una mercancía fantástica. Una fantasía. Ni lo puedes comer ni te abriga, pero representa toda la comida y toda la ropa del mundo. Por eso es una ficción. Y eso mismo lo convierte en el patrón con el que valoramos todas las mercancías. ¿Qué comporta eso? Pues que el dinero se convierte en el bien de consumo universal. Pero recuerda: el dinero es una ficción; bienes de consumo en forma de pura fantasía, ¿entiendes? Y eso es doblemente cierto en el caso del capital financiero. Las acciones, los valores, los bonos. ¿Crees que alguna de las cosas que compran y venden esos bandidos del otro lado del río representan algún valor real y concreto? No, para nada. Las acciones, los valores bursátiles y toda esa porquería no son más que promesas de un valor futuro. Así pues, si el dinero es una ficción, el capital financiero es la ficción de una ficción. Con eso comercian todos esos criminales: con ficciones.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust