So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labour included, and can trade those things freely with others. They can buy, sell, accumulate, save, share and give. They can enjoy all that their freely exercised labour can secure for them and even, if they choose, do nothing and still survive. You can take away the freedom to buy and sell; you can compel people to work on terms that they would not freely accept; you can confiscate property or forbid this or that form of it. But if those are the alternatives to ‘capitalism’ there is, now, no real alternative save slavery. Roger Scruton
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. - Unknown

  2. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. - Terry Eagleton

  3. The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them. - Mokokoma Mokhonoana

  4. Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud. - Rosa Luxemburg

  5. LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE - Ernesto Cardenal

More Quotes By Roger Scruton
  1. Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.

  2. Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth...

  3. The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.

  4. The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking...

  5. Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self,...

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