Neoliberal Quotes

“The whole idea of "leaners" and "lifters" is the central teaching of the right wing ideologue, Ayn Rand, who penned books like The Virtue of Selfishness. It’s a self-serving crock. Rand found out the hard way. After a lifetime proselytising on behalf of the "producers" and denouncing anyone needing government assistance as "parasites," when Rand became old and sick, she discovered that even a bestselling author could not afford health care in the neoliberal US. She availed herself of Medicare and ended her life on what she had despised – social security.
~ an edited extract from "The Life of I: the new culture of narcissism" ~Anne Manne~”
― Anne Manne

“Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds.”
― Milton Friedman

“ultimately, the long-term goal is to have a critically informed public vote out of office representatives that are sacrificing children to the corporate bottom line with prepackaged teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes.”
― Pepi Leistyna

“No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
― Joe Biden

“A smaller but still significant risk of taking the neoliberal pill is you get more misguided adventures like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, there’s no way that elites could get us into another Iraq today. This at first glance appears to be a good thing, but it’s been at the cost of our culture becoming more neurotic, cynical, parochial, and fearful. Americans wouldn’t go off and die by the thousands in Iraq today because they don’t think anything is worth fighting for or believing in. Young people aren’t even leaving the house. I’d rather be a country that occasionally fights stupid wars than one that shuts itself off from the rest of the world and gives up on any idealistic vision of the future.”
― Richard Hanania

“The West has no idea of the human and economic costs imposed on it by the mere existence of dictatorship in the world.”
― David Steinman

“I had a professional background in economic development and was fluent in the language of business - even while having fought and bled politically for organized labor in the auto industry.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“En el régimen neoliberal, la explotación ya no se produce como alienación y auto-des-realización, sino como libertad y autorrealización. Aquí ya no existe el otro como explotador que me obliga a trabajar y me explota, sino que más bien soy yo mismo quien me exploto voluntariamente, creyendo que me estoy realizando. Me mato a base de autorrealizarme. Me mato a base de optimizarme. En este contexto resulta imposible toda resistencia, toda sublevación, toda revolución.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, Burnoutgesellschaft, Hoch-Zeit