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While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources... in reality they are competing for money - using markets and resources to do so. So designing new money systems really amounts to redesigning the target that orients much human effort.

— Bernard Lietaer

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Money

More quotes by Bernard Lietaer

Money is an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange.

The Future of Money (2001)

In essence, money is a lifeblood flowing through ourselves, our society, our global human community, and should be acknowledged and treated consciously.

The money system is bad for social and environmental sustainability... [and] ...bad for the money system itself. Unless we fundamentally restructure it, we cannot achieve monetary stability.

The issuing city/region requires payment from each household of, say, 10 Civics/quarter...

Money and Sustainability, The Missing Link, The Club of Rome - EU Chapter to Finance Watch and the World Business Academ (2012)

Money is like an iron ring we've put through our noses. We've forgotten that we designed it, and it's now leading us around. I think it's time to figure out where we want to go--in my opinion toward sustainability and community--and then design a money system that gets us there.

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bernard Lietaer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.