Skip to content

Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.

— Terry Eagleton Why Marx Was Right (2011)

Another quote →

Topics

Capitalism

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Why Marx Was Right (2011)

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

Why Marx Was Right (2011)

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Why Marx Was Right (2011)

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

All Terry Eagleton quotes →

You may also like

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