David Graeber famous quotes

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.
-- David Graeber

#Facts #Embarrassing #Form

Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
-- David Graeber

#Acting #Action #Direct

As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
-- David Graeber

#Debt #Pay #Turns

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.
-- David Graeber

#People #Benefits

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.
-- David Graeber

#Debt #Way #Violence

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 the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.
-- David Graeber

#Suicide #People #Imagination

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?
-- David Graeber

#Philosophy #Believe #Mean

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
-- David Graeber

#Civilization #Creating #Alternatives

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, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination, and willing - with it's cumbersome securitization and insane military projects - to destroy the capitalist order itself if that's what it took to make it seem inevitable.
-- David Graeber

#Military #Essence #Order

Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
-- David Graeber

#Together #States #Anthropology

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. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
-- David Graeber

#Hate #Thinking #Agreement

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 tell us what we truly owe.
-- David Graeber

#Schemes #True Value #Values

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.
-- David Graeber

#Hurt #Caring #Family And Friends

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
-- David Graeber

#People #Want #Unexpected

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 of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
-- David Graeber

#Suicidal #Energy #Viruses

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 problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.
-- David Graeber

#Dream #Song #Sex

Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
-- David Graeber

#Purpose #Slave

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
-- David Graeber

#Today #States #Form

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 in a way where everyone has an equal say.
-- David Graeber

#People #Democracy #Together

Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.
-- David Graeber

#Debt #Way #Faults

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

#Running #Military #War

What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
-- David Graeber

#Math #Promise #Debt

A debt ... is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.
-- David Graeber

#Debt #Completion

I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
-- David Graeber

#Thinking #Disaster #Exodus

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 would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.
-- David Graeber

#Dream #Law #Greed

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 with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.
-- David Graeber

#Country #Powerful #Military

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 with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.
-- David Graeber

#Jobs #Self #Finishing

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 makes possible - what we call 'the economy' - is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is.
-- David Graeber

#Roots #Evil #Important

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 sat down and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they are ordering pizzas, but basically never.
-- David Graeber

#Country #Thinking #Decision

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 exist at all? It's hard to answer the question if you don't know what money actually is. Proposing to eliminate it entirely seems utopian and naive.
-- David Graeber

#Looks #Answers #Revolution