50+ Best Capitalism Quotes: Exclusive Selection

Profoundly inspirational capitalism quotes will challenge the way you think, and make your life worth living.

Famous Capitalism Quotes

The farmer and manufacturer can no more live without profit than the labourer without wages. David Ricardo

Capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Albert Einstein

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best. Thomas Sowell

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty. Fidel Castro

Nothing is more deadly to achievement than the belief that effort will not be rewarded, that the world is a bleak and discriminatory place in which only the predatory and the specially preferred can get ahead. George Gilder

or capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business. Karl Marx

I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. F.A. Hayek

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated. Thomas Sowell

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists. G. K. Chesterton

What one person disdains or values lightly is appreciated by another, and what one person abandons is often picked up by another. Carl Menger

Capitalism itself is not to be condemned. And surely it is not vicious of its very nature, but it has been vitiated. Pope Pius XI

Demand and supply are the opposite extremes of the beam, whence depend the scales of dearness and cheapness; the price is the point of equilibrium, where the momentum of the one ceases, and that of the other begins. Jean Baptiste Say

Under capitalism the more money you have, the easier it is to make money, and the less money you have, the harder.

The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualized in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others. F.A. Hayek

Capitalism is God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor. Ron Swanson

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out. Ludwig von Mises

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system. Robert Heilbroner

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. Frédéric Bastiat

Capitalism means that a few people will do very well, and the rest will serve the few. Michael Moore

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. Henry Hazlitt

Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions. Barney Frank

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. F.A. Hayek

Capitalism is about the mutual creation of wealth rather than the pillaging of it. Ted Malloch

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property. Milton Friedman

Capitalism might be defined, if we wish to be scientific, as a form of economic organization motivated by the pursuit of profit within a price structure. Carroll Quigley

All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labour, namely, when, instead of one man doing everything, each confines himself to a certain kind of work distinct from others in the treatment it requires, so as to be able to perform it with greater facility and in the greatest perfection. Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack of all trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism. Immanuel Kant

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world outlook. Francis Parker Yockey

It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money. Dr. Art Laffer

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. Ayn Rand

The message from history is so blatantly obvious that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer. Matt Ridley

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. Winston Churchill

Love locally, trade globally. Russ Roberts

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. John Maynard Keynes

The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Milton Friedman

Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating prosperity. Johan Norberg

People who lack the capacity to earn a decent living need to be helped, but they will not be helped by minimum wage laws, trade union wage pressures or other devices which seek to compel employers to pay them more than their [labor] is worth. The more likely outcome of such regulations is that the intended beneficiaries are not employed at all. James Tobin

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized. Noam Chomsky

Nothing should be more obvious than that the business organism cannot function according to design when its most important ‘parameters of action wages, prices, interest are transferred to the political sphere and there dealt with according to the requirements of the political game or, which sometimes is more serious still, according to the ideas of some planners. Joseph A. Schumpeter

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty of the indefinite expansion of possibility. Susan Sontag

Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Thomas Sowell

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force. George Bernard Shaw

The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism, the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise. Henry Hazlitt

Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy. David Korten

A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom. Lord Acton

Capitalism offers you freedom, but far from giving people freedom, it enslaves them. Ian Mckellen

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. Ludwig Von Mises

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. Joseph Schumpeter

Citizens who over rely on their government to do everything not only become dependent on their government, they end up having to do whatever the government demands. In the meantime, their initiative and self respect are destroyed. Charles G. Koch

Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other right. Abraham Lincoln

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