Top 50 Quotes & Sayings by David Harvey

If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.

There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.

The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, then capitalism is not long for this world.

The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.

If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?

Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.

My advice to everybody would be to go out as much as possible and deal with social inequality and environmental degradation because these issues are increasingly prescient.

Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.

All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe.

We're supposed to live under capitalism, and capitalism is supposed to be competitive so you would expect that capitalists and entrepreneurs would like competition. Well, it turns out that capitalists do everything they can to avoid competition.

The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

Cities begin to use cultural production as a way to market their city as being unique and special. Of course, the problem with this is that much of culture is very easy to replicate. The uniqueness begins to disappear. Then, we have what I call the "Disneyfication" of society.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.

Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.

Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism.

Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.

There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?

Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.

Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.

Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class.

Capital creates space-time.

Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses.

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.

Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.

Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

What sets imperialism of the capitalist sort apart from other conceptions of empire is that it is the capitalist logic that typically dominates, though ... there are times in which the territorial logic comes to the fore. But this then poses a crucial question: how can the territorial logics of power, which tend to be awkwardly fixed in space, respond to the open spatial dynamics of endless capital accumulation? And what does endless capital accumulation imply for the territorial logics of power?

The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium.

But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.

The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism.

Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale.

The social relations of capitalism have penetrated slowly into all spheres of life to make wage labour the general condition of existence only in fairly recent times.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute rather than to generate wealth and income.

The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.

Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.

The accumulation of capital involves the expansion of value over time.

When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.

The net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers.

Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.

Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

People must get active; go outside; get moving. This is a crucial time. You know, massive wealth and capital haven't budged one bit, so far. We have to give it a huge push if we want to see something different in our society. We need to create mechanisms and forms of organization which reflect the needs and wants of society as a whole, not just a privileged-oligarchic class of individuals.