David Graeber Quotes

When an economist attempts to prove that it is "irrational" to vote in national elections (because t...

Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will alwa...

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves ...

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like...

How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarizat...

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence...

The real origin of the democratic spirit - and most likely, many democratic institutions - lies prec...

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of huma...

Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by direc...

So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have ...

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patch...

I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am theref...

Even in the Bible, the admonition in the Ten Commandments not to 'covet thy neighbor's wife' clearly...

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition,...

In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England—the first successful modern central...

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think,...

Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look...

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was ...

In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One ca...

If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, the...

Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual...

The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal sta...

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yours...

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment i...

The basic principle of structural analysis, I was explaining, is that the terms of a symbolic system...

This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call i...

The “self-actualization” philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insist...

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed ...

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of org...

While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing ...

The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing dul...

What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with wh...

There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one i...

Honor is Surplus Dignity: Honor, at its simplest, is that excess dignity that must be defended with ...

IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.

money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumab...

But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market ...

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system ...

As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of t...