David Graeber Quotes

25 quotes in 621 categories

• We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy…
• Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The…
• States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
• Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
• Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
• In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to…
• Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all…
• Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
• But in the years since the neoliberal project really has been stripped down to what was always its essence: not an economic project at all,…
• It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
• Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis.…
• If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one…
• It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it…
• It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve…
• It's true that most American citizens think of themselves as living in a democratic country. But when was the last time that any Americans actually…
• Money has always been a particular problem for revolutionaries and anti-capitalists. What will money look like 'after the revolution'? How will it function? Will it…
• We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education…
• There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
• The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world…
• I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.

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