Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Ferguson

If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

It is much simpler and easier to collect and caress the trophies of our democratic inheritance than it is to fashion up-to-date tools with which to work on our current problems.

The real challenge is figuring out how the United States can regain control of its future from its new oligarchy and restore its position as a prosperous, fair, well-educated nation. For if we don't, the current pattern of great concentration of wealth and power will worsen, and we may face the steady immiseration of most of the American population.

I sort of plunged into filmmaking. I decided I'd jump off the deep end, so I started thinking about what kind of a movie I should try to make.

Any attempt to disturb the deadly routine of instruction is looked upon as sabotage. And the notion that the aims and functions of education should be determined in the local community by a close and continuous discussion among students, faculty, administration, and citizens is so visionary that it is not even seriously considered.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.

When the financial crisis arrived, it seemed to me that this was something I had to make a movie about.

I used to be a businessman and I enjoyed what I did and I thought that it was socially useful. I don't have anything against business or private enterprise or capitalism per se, but I think that it is time to rethink the regulation of capitalism.

A fierce and sentimental addiction to forms makes us shudder at change. It is much easier to say that the system is all right-only the people need to be improved.

I'm actually all in favor of freeing the entrepreneurial spirit - but it turns out, interestingly, that you actually need very strict regulations to free the entrepreneurial spirit.

I thought I should try something relatively inexpensive, relatively contained, relatively small. I started working on a feature, a film I'd still like to make: a very talky film of people and ideas about our contemporary state with regard to relationships, marriage, sex, and romance. I started trying to educate myself about filmmaking.

Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.

When the U.S. government is serious about doing something that's complicated and difficult, it can do it.

I'd been a film maniac since I was very young; by the time I was eight or nine years old, I was hooked on movies.

WikiLeaks combines several of my prior interests in technology, policy questions, and journalism.

But that's not how most of the people mentioned in this book became wealthy. Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful.

Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong.

A very high fraction of America's economic problems come not from our difficulties with education or globalization or competition with the Chinese or whatever. But they come from the fact that a small number of wealthy and powerful people who run dangerous and/or inefficient companies are able, through the use of money in the political process, to prevent the government from regulating them properly.

Everyone knows, or has strongly suspected, that capital theory is difficult.