The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Thanks to our free-enterprise system and phenomenal advances in marketing, we now stand on the threshold of an era when the American palate, stimulated by delicacies formerly reserved only for a Maecenas, will one day hold aloft a gustatory torch for the entire world.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.

Bearing all this in mind, we see that there is no Russian national understanding which would permit the early establishment in Russia of anything resembling the private enterprise system as we know it.

The cement in our whole democracy today is the worker who makes $ 15 an hour. He's the guy who will buy a house and a car and a refrigerator. He's the oil in the engine.

Capitalist man was accomplishing moral and political virtue as well as observing economic reason when he vigorously pursued his personal gain.

To talk of capitalism as an economic system is the first step away from fatalism.

Capitalism is moving toward its end massively, imperceptibly, like a glacier. Its decadence is cold, not hot.

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat.

No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism-money.

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

We have a society based on having and owning; we need a society based around being and giving.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.