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It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialization from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance.

— Jason Hickel Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021)

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Capitalism

More quotes by Jason Hickel

The colonial high-water mark was an effect of capitalist policy and should never have existed.

If the whole population were to consume and emit like Ireland and Switzerland, we would be living on a dead planet right now.

More than 40 years of experimentation with neoliberalism shows that it erodes the power of voters to decide the rules that govern the economic systems they inhabit.

The Handbook of Neoliberalism (2016)

To get a sense of how extreme overconsumption is: if we all were to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent of 3.4 earths.

The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (2018)

GDP was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent. It tallies up all money-based activity, but it doesn't care whether that activity is useful or destructive.

The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (2018)

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I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism.

Huey P. Newton Revolutionary Suicide (1973)

The most obvious negative feature of capitalism is that it can produce private monopolies that restrict output and thereby harm consumers.

Dennis Mueller The Oxford Handbook of Capitalism (2012)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the moral, nor the ethics, nor the will to solve the problems of poverty.

Fidel Castro

Attribution

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