Quotes / Capitalism Is Bad

"We have ways of making you buy!"

— Top Salesman, Looney Tunes

""There, there it is again - the Invisible Hand of the marketplace giving us the finger."

— Dialogue from a political cartoon by Charles Barsotti

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian: What difference does that make? He's dead.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his family will get it.
Yossarian: He didn't have time to have a family.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his parents will get it.
Yossarian: They don't need it, they're rich.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then they'll understand.

— Catch-22

Dros: (he opens his eyes and stares right through the Detective) It was real. I'd seen it. I'd seen it in reality.
Half-Light: Some kind of great terror. Worse than you've ever seen.
The Detective: Seen what?
Dros: The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest, most courageous people in the world. (he fails silent for moment) You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know.
The Detective: What?
Dros: That the bourgeois are not human.

— Disco Elysium

"No better way to steal money than free enterprise."

—Emil Andorowsky, RoboCop (1987)

We work. To earn the right to work.
To earn the right to work.
To earn the right to work.
To earn the right to work.
To earn the right to give
Ourselves the rights to buy
Ourselves the right to live
To earn the right to die.

— The Stupendium, "THE FINE PRINT | The Outer Worlds Song"

"When you trick somebody into participating in a small-time fraud, it's called a 'scam'. But when the scam is so big that people have no choice but to participate, it's called 'economics'."

—Thorstone Pebblen, The Flintstones

The lord of all, the money-god,
Who rules us blood and hand and brain

—George Orwell, St. Andrew’s Day, 1935

"You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage!"

— Ellen Ripley, Aliens

"You don't know jack about business
Cause you're the crack in our system
The before and after picture of capitalism
A sad sack with a pack full of fashist rich men"

— The Professor to Jordan Belfort, Freshy Kanal Rap Battles, "Money Heist vs. The Wolf of Wall Street"

Dragonball Evolution is what every good filmmaker working for a studio must fight against in order to make good films. It is focus testing, market research, demographic pandering, trend analysis, a franchise roadmap, merchandising opportunities, and everything else that capitalism "contributes" to cinema, extracted and isolated from the meaning, artistry, passion, and basic storytelling ability that creators forced to work within that system bring to the table. It is a product, soulless and empty, produced solely to empty your wallet. And the system that produced it, the only system that could ever produce something like it, is the dominant governing force in all of our lives. There, now that silly virus thing doesn't sound all that bad, does it?

— Mother's Basement, "The Roast of Dragonball Evolution"

Richfield: We're gonna have the best third-quarter in history!
Earl: Uh.. Sir, I think this could be the last third quarter in history.
Richfield: Oh, don’t turn into one of those environmental doomsayers, Sinclair! Boohoo, it’s raining acid, there’s a hole in the ozone, you’re hurting Flipper! Blah! Bunch of tree hugging pantywaists! They’re always standing in the way of progress, and it’s our job to pave right over them!
Earl: I think you’re missing the point, sir. The world may be coming to an end!
Richfield: Well, that’s a fourth quarter problem! We’ll drop a bomb on that bridge when we come to it! Right now, my biggest problem is trying to figure out what to do with all this money! Ahahaha...! AHAHAHAHAHA!

— Dinosaurs

Look at those dumb clucks hand over their life savings for a few brief moments of mouth-watering bliss! Hmm, but what am I gonna do when all my paying customers have turned into useless Chickadactyls? Koopa, you capitalistic fiend, you're a genius! I'll open up Flew the Koopas Fried Chickendactyl Stand! Fortune number two coming up! Like they say, you can’t be too rich, or too evil!

—King Koopa, Super Mario World (1991)

"Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world."

— Tyrell Wellick, Mr. Robot

"The Pentagon spent $83 million on Viagra last year. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, the fucking Supreme Court does its part, tears the autonomy, rips the liberty away from women, shreds not just their choice but their future, their potential. We turn men into cum fountains and women into factories, cranking out, what, an impoverished workforce, there for the labor and to spend what little they make consuming. And what do we teach them to want? Houses they can't afford. Cars that poison the air. Single-serve plastics, clothes made by starving children in third world countries, and they want it so bad that they're begging for it, they're screaming for it, they're insisting upon it. And we're the problem? These fucking monsters, these fucking consumers, these fucking mouths. They point at you and me like we're the problem. "

— Madeline Usher, The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

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