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The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.

— David Graeber

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More quotes by David Graeber

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being.

Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.

Exchange is all about equivalence.

Honor is the same as credit; it's one's ability to keep ones promises, but also, in the case of a wrong, to "get even".

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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: David Graeber (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.