Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,808 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
David Graeber
69 quotes
“Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press: 2009), p. 203
“One could well argue that if there is any human essence, it is precisely our capacity to imagine that we have one.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Direct Action: An Ethnograpy (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), pp. 525–526
“Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist — even if you don’t realize it.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right's approach is to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offer themselves up as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist.The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Exchange implies equality.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Exchange is all about equivalence.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All societies based on slavery tend to be marked by this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Honor is a zero sum game.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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".”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Indeed, India has become notorious as a country in which a very large part of the working population is laboring in effective debt peonage to a landlord or other creditor.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Medieval corporations owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a "shilling" than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company knew was debt.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him there is a man with a gun.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 364
“Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt: the United States continues to spend more on its military than do all other nations on earth put together, and military expenditures are not only the basis of the government's industrial policy; they also take up such a huge proportion of the budget that by many estimations, were it not for them, the United States would not run a deficit at all.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 365
“The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", pp. 365–366
“What I have been trying to do in this book is not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives, enlarge our sense of possibilities; to begin to ask what it would mean to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 383
“The one thing that's clear is that new ideas won't emerge without the jettisoning of much of our accustomed categories of thought—which have become mostly sheer dead weight, if not intrinsic parts of the very apparatus of hopelessness—and formulating new ones. This is why I spent so much of this book talking about the market, but also about the false choice between state and market that so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 384
“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 (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 386
“What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 391
“Nowadays, nobody talks about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of out existence. It’s as if as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap out hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consensus is not just a set of techniques. When we talk about process, what we’re really talking about is the gradual creation of a culture of democracy. This brings us back to rethinking some of our most basic assumptions about what democracy is even about.”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is how consensus is supposed to work: the group agrees, first, to some common purpose. This allows the group to look at decision making as a matter of solving common problems. Seen this way, a diversity of perspectives, even a radical diversity of perspectives, while it might cause difficulties, can also be an enormous resource. After all, what sort of team is more likely to come up with a creative solution to a problem: a group of people who all see matters somewhat differently, or a group of people who all see things exactly the same?”
David Graeber (1961–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source