“Capitalism: God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor.”— Greg Daniels, Ron Swanson, Nick Offerman, imdb.com
“Beginning in the fall, there was all this excitement about Christmas and how it was a day for them. After Thanksgiving, they couldn't miss it. It was fixed so they couldn't miss it. The wreaths and decorations everywhere, and bells ringing, and trees in the park, and Santa Clauses on every corner, a…”— John Cheever, newyorker.com
“Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.”— John Cheever, newyorker.com
“I don’t think that having great wealth in itself is fundamentally immoral. It depends what you do with it. If, let’s say, you take someone like Warren Buffett—if he was clearsighted about the fact that he was going to use this wealth for good, as he is doing by donating it to the Gates Foundation, a…”— Peter Singer, theconcourse.deadspin.com
“In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act”— Caroline Caldwel, twitter.com
“People desire control over their time more than almost anything. This is true of consumers, whose tastes in fashion comes and goes but whose desire to not wait in line or waste a weekend getting their car fixed is timeless. It’s true for employees, most of whom want to work hard but question everyth…”— Morgan Housel, linkedin.com
“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is not money.”— Mark Twain, amazon.com
“Large corporations have resources to influence media and overwhelm the political process, and do so accordingly.”— Noam Chomsky, amazon.com
“Working is overrated. People try to make it about dignity, but it's all forced because of capitalism.”— alicia fiasco, twitter.com
“The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of Insecurity.”— Gilles Deleuze, amazon.com
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com
“It seems like the better it gets, the more miserable people become. There’s never a technological advancement where people think, ‘Wow, we can finally do this!’ … And I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Americans have it constantly drilled into our heads, every fucking day, that we deser…”— Eric Spitznagel, vanityfair.com
“Life under contemporary capitalism demands an aggressive alienation from each other and our bodies. Most of western culture is dedicated to recouping sensation amid that strain. When your life doesn’t seem to have much meaning, wringing the most out of moments of pleasure and friendship take on a ne…”— Ayesha Siddiqi, thenewinquiry.com
“Communism had succeeded in wresting entire generations away from the work ethic, in killing in them the slightest desire to produce, in making them lazy. This historical scandal is coming to an end. The whole of Europe is going to work in concert. But the question still remains: shouldn't we have pr…”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com
“On TV, there’s another war. Around and around and around. Even the most entrenched believers in the new global order have a mounting sense that some fundamental mindshift is needed. The contradictions of late-capitalist life put increasing pressure on our psyches to synthesize the data, yet insights…”— Rob Wipond, adbusters.org
“High school, it seems, has changed. It has become competitive. Young men and women — 13 to 18 years old — must work more or less tirelessly to ensure their spot at a college deemed worthy to them and their families. So rather than living their adolescent lives — lives brimming with desires and vital…”— Daniel Coffeen, thoughtcatalog.com
“The best filter isn’t BuzzFeed, or The Atlantic, or whatever. The best filter is money. That is how you say “I love you.” This is America. This is a capitalist country. We say “I’m sorry” with money. We say “I love you” with money.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, buzzfeed.com
“Copyright has always been the best filter for talent, because if it was good, you knew it because you got paid. That is the best formula. Anything else is noise.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, amazon.com
“On the morning of my forty-second birthday, I got a call from my mother. 'Happy birthday,' she said. 'Remember, your dad was forty-two when he had his first attack.' The men in my family don't tend to grow old. I think about that sometimes, when I see my teenage kids dig through the refrigerator in…”— Erik Prince, amazon.com