A Quote by Tony Benn

People would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions and aspirations derive from the type of economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion it creates, and question the sense and purpose of a society where control of a large portion of life is abdicated under contract in the labour market, and where immense creativity and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive tasks in order to earn a wage.

Tony Benn

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Ask Aspirations Contract Control Creates Creativity Derive Difficult Earn Economic Economic System Exhaustion How Immense Inhabit Insecurity Labour Large Life Life Is Life Is A Many Market Need Order People Portion Potential Purpose Question Repetitive Sense Society System Tasks Themselves Type Wage Well Would

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Tony Benn
English - Politician
April 3, 1925 - March 14, 2014

If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.

R. Buckminster Fuller

I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The demand that people be present themselves, that they contribute to the reorganization of society, that they own up to their own complicity in a system from which they derive benefit and advantage, often without acknowledgement, and the discomfort, the uncomfortable way in which that must be acknowledged.

Michael Eric Dyson

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union.

Rudolf Rocker

We need to do a top/bottom review of the federal government and for every agency administration bureaucracy that is not called for in the United States Constitution, we have to really ask the question what is its purpose, how many people work there, how much does it cost the taxpayers and what is the value to our society.

Josh Mandel

Successive governments in the U.K. have worked to create a more flexible labour market, which also meant labour insecurity. They allowed wages to drop and non-wage benefits to shrivel, creating worse inequality than statistics reveal.

Guy Standing

This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society - one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security.

Michael Lerner

Smith, as we have said, was not the proponent of any one class. He was a slave to his system. His whole economic philosophy stemmed from his unquestioning faith in the ability of the market to guide the system to its point of highest return. The market — that wonderful social machine — would take care of society's needs if it was left alone. "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production," he wrote.

Robert Heilbroner

The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.

William Greider

And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

Abraham Maslow

Somebody asked me a question. It was a defining question: 'What type of legacy do you want to leave?' We ask that question a lot later in life, but we need to start asking it to young people.

Marc Kielburger

I believe there are huge numbers of people in this country who would be willing to have radical changes in our economic and social system in order to make it a more egalitarian society and do away with homelessness and hunger and clean up the environment. But these people have no voice. They have no way of expressing themselves. Elections give them no way of expressing themselves.

Howard Zinn

Republicans need to stop making assumptions, and they need to start talking to younger people, people of color, and ask them - not talk to them - ask them, 'What is it that we can do better? How do we earn your vote? How do we earn the ability for you to see that we can be the party that will make your life better and that of your children?'

Susana Martinez

Single people slip out of the dating market for many social, economic, psychological, and ideological reasons including marriage, illness, bankruptcy, job promotion, exhaustion, and common sense. Inevitably, however, they return because of divorce, boredom, loneliness, and memory loss.

Linda Sunshine

We need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in the society.

Warren Buffett

In the present state of human society, however, We deem it advisable that the wage-contract should, when possible, be modified somewhat by a contract of partnership, as is already being tried in various ways to the no small gain both of the wage-earners and of the employers. In this way wage-earners are made sharers in some sort in the ownership, or the management, or the profits.

Pope Pius XI

A Quote by Tony Benn

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