Puck's Quote Board, page 2
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The one thing that’s clear is that new ideas won’t emerge without the jettisoning of much of our accustomed categories of thought— which have become mostly sheer dead weight, if not intrinsic parts of the very apparatus of hopelessness—and formulating new ones. This is why I spent so much of this book talking about the market, but also about the false choice between state and market that so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.
Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, it’s still largely up to us to determine how it’s going to turn out. For instance: the last time we shifted from a bullion economy to one of virtual credit money, at the end of the Axial Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages, the immediate shift was experienced largely as a series of great catastrophes. Will it be the same this time around? Presumably a lot depends on how consciously we set out to ensure that it won’t be.Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined as “lobbying”), so the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, 50 percent, or even in some cases (for instance for payday loans) 120 percent annually, once typical only of organized crime, perfectly legal — and therefore, enforceable no longer by just hired goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victims’ doorsteps, but by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and police.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.
Speaker: John Maynard KeynesSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Free your mind of the idea of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
Speaker: Ursula K. Le GuinSource: The DispossessedPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:30 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Such imaginary constructs are of course what scientists refer to as “models,” and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. Actually I think a fair case can be made that we cannot think without them. The problem with such models — at least, it always seems to happen when we model something called “the market” — is that, once created, we have a tendency to treat them as objective realities, or even fall down before them and start worshiping them as gods. “We must obey the dictates of the market!”
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Christians are rare people on earth. This is why the world needs a strict, harsh temporal government which will compel and constrain the wicked to refrain from theft and robbery, and to return what they borrow (although a Christian ought neither to demand nor expect it). This is necessary in order that the world may not become a desert, peace vanish, and men’s trade and society be utterly destroyed; all of which would happen if we were to rule the world according to the gospel, rather than driving and compelling the wicked by laws and the use of force to do and to allow what is right.
Speaker: Martin LutherSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.
Speaker: Pierre BordieuSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:24 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Debt peonage, it would appear, is far more likely to inspire outrage and collective action than is a system premised on pure inequality.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:24 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Through most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation, the freeing of those in bondage, and usually a more just reallocation of the land.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:23 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer which is wrong.
Speaker: H.L. MenkenPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.Speaker: RumiPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:20 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly.
Speaker: L. Frank BaumPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There’s no place like home.”
The Scarecrow signed. “Of course I cannot understand it. If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places.”Speaker: L. Frank BaumSource: The Wonderful Wizard of OzPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:18 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When people say “clean as a whistle,” they forget that a whistle is full of spit!
Speaker: George CarlinPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:17 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When I was a little boy I used to read about the decline of western civilization. And I decided it was something I’d like to make a contribution to.
Speaker: George CarlinPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:16 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. “200 dead as Number 3 slams ashore,” is not nearly as interesting a headline as, “Charlie kills 200.” Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.
Speaker: George CarlinPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:16 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!