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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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