Skip to content

Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.

— David Graeber

Another quote →

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".

All David Graeber quotes →

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.