Yquotes.com

 

Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”
--
Attributed by Sir George Schuster, Christianity and human relations in industry (1951), p. 109
--
Recent variant: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
--
As quoted in Moving Forward: Programme for a Participatory Economy (2000) by Michael Albert, p. 128

 

John Maynard Keynes

» John Maynard Keynes - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

Basically, what I believe in is neither capitalism nor globalization... I believe in man's capacity for achieving great things and in the combined force resulting from encounters and exchanges. I plead for greater liberty and a more open world... because it provides a setting which liberates individuals and their creativity as no other system can. It spurs the dynamism which has led to human, economic, scientific, and technical advances, and which will continue to do so. Believing in capitalism does not mean believing in growth, the economy, or efficiency. Desirable as these may be, these are only the results. Belief in capitalism is, fundamentally, belief in mankind.

 

Johan Norberg

 

I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.

 

Abby Sunderland

 

Yes — you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse — that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this?

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

One of the nastiest aspects of the 'no-fly list' — and believe it or not, its authors are proud of this part — is that you can't find out whether you're on it until you've paid for your ticket and are standing in line to get your boarding pass. Denied the service that you paid for, to my knowledge there is no way to get your money back. Nor is there any way to find out why you're on the list, or how you can get off. It is known that civil rights advocates of various kinds have been placed on the list, apparently because they're civil rights advocates.

 

L. Neil Smith

 

The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and the canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.

 

Adam Smith