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The landlord, qua landlord, performs no function in the economy of industry or of food production. He is a rent receiver; that, and nothing more. Were the landlord to be abolished, the soil and the people who till it would still remain, and the disappearance of the landowner would pass almost unnoticed. So too with the capitalist.

— Keir Hardie

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Capitalism

More quotes by Keir Hardie

Socialism proposes to dethrone the brute-god Mammon and to lift humanity into its place.

“Their honesty,” said honest Keir Hardie, “is proverbial. They borrow and lend on word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown.”

Socialism does not propose to abolish land or capital. Only a genius could have thought of this as an objection to Socialism. Socialism proposes to abolish capitalism and landlordism.

They of the Labour party were free-traders to a man.

No law can give freedom to a people which is dependent upon some power or authority outside themselves for the necessaries of life. The owners of the means of life can dictate the terms upon which all who are not owners are to be permitted to live.

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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.

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