11 quotes
Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
Corporations may have no souls, but they can love each other.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
Monopoly is business at the end of its journey.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its possessors, and pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in palaces.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
It illustrates what Ruskin calls the "morbid" character of modern business that the history of its most brilliant episodes must be studied in the vestibules of the penitentiary.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things for humanity.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
Everywhere, in the commune, the canton, the Confederation, the persistent dominant desire of the people to retain direct control over specific acts of government, and to refuse plenary powers to elected representatives, gives special character to Swiss democracy.
The Swiss Democracy: The Study of a Sovereign People (1908)
Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the few.
Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)
The methods by which the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Fields, Rockefellers, Mackays, Floods, O'Briens, and the coal and iron and salt Pashas are heaping up enormous fortunes are methods, not of creation of wealth, but of the redistribution of the wealth of the masses into the pockets of monopolists.