I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt Quotes

“1. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. 2. If you want to survive, remember to secure your own oxygen mask before securing the oxygen masks of others. 3. Whatever you do, though, don’t forget about the others.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“We’re all just doing our best to get by; sometimes you’re on the giving end, other times you’re on the receiving end.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“You don’t get anything you want in life by keeping what you want a secret.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Wage labor is all exploitation in the end. We’re coerced into accepting employment because we’ll die if we don’t. There’s no choice there. There’s barely even an illusion of choice.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“It’s amazing how much extra cash flow is freed up when one person isn’t hoarding all the money at the top.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“In 2019, Microsoft Japan implemented a four-day workweek without reducing pay for its workers. The result? Productivity increased 40 percent.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The commodification of housing is an evil that will never make sense to me. How have we let greed go so far that the very things we need to stay alive, things like shelter, have become reduced to commodities for the rich to profit from while the rest of us struggle?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“As long as there has been money, there has been debt. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have either, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We live here, now.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Drew loved to learn about physics and space. It made him feel small and insignificant, but in a way that eased some of the pressure he felt about needing to make it in today’s dystopian soul-crushing world.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Was life really an endless string of being bounced around from company to company, from Owner to Owner, being seen as a line item on a balance sheet—a number to get as low as possible to maximize profits?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Don't listen if anyone ever tells you it's a dog-eat-dog world. Dogs are pack animals. We're stronger together.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“We went home that night and fell asleep in each other’s arms. “I love you,” he told me before we went to bed, kissing me on the forehead. The next morning, I woke up, and Drew was gone. In the canyon by our house, he’d shot himself in the heart.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Nothing in capitalism is easy.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Real estate investors want to create a nation of renters, and it’s easy to see why: there’s massive profit in price-gouging people for rent.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“I sat down with a notebook and wrote down my plan for the future: 1. pay off my debt 2. save a down payment for a house 3. plan for my retirement 4. help everyone I care about do the same”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“If love is to understand someone and be understood by them, as I’ve always suspected, it’s possible there were no two people more in love in the history of the world than Drew and me.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Millennials might have been the first generation in U.S. history to collectively realize that capitalism was built on a house of cards, while the rich took bets on when and how it would fall.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“why should the people on top make the most money when the people on the bottom do the most work?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The minimum wage today is worth 31 percent less than it was in 1968. By contrast, housing prices have more than doubled when adjusted for inflation.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“In 2021, 73 percent of Americans ranked financial issues as their number one cause of stress—above politics, work, or family—and these numbers are highest in Generation Z and Millennials, with over 80 percent of people born after 1980 reporting that they find their finances to be a source of stress.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Don’t feel bad about owing money to a bank. They’re evil bloodsucking mega-corporations and they don’t care about us.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“To put it succinctly, if everyone owns a burger shop but refuses to work in it, who will flip the burgers?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The American Dream tells us that we can change our economic reality if only we work hard enough, but time and time again, we see that class mobility is a myth.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The same standardized tests that ranked me in the top 0.01 percent
of all academic performers had been created from a system originally
developed by the eugenicist Carl Brigham to help separate test-takers by
race and economic background. I was smart enough to know that school
didn’t measure intelligence; it just measured how good you were at school.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“I was on MySpace; I had a Xanga online diary.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Punk might be dead, or it might be more alive than ever—growing like weeds through the cracks of the concrete that is our daily lives struggling to get by in a system of capitalism.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“I might be looking for a fight. You can take the girl out of Fresno, but you can’t take the Fresno out of the girl apparently.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“We all know it’s fair, deep down in our kindergarten brains, where we learn the difference between right and wrong, and all about how sharing works, but that doesn’t stop it from being shocking. People tell themselves quiet lies to normalize the suffering. By some calculations, income inequality in the United States today is worse than it was in France in 1789. They cut people’s heads off for that one.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“It feels revolutionary, which is sad in its own right. It shouldn’t be revolutionary that people who work are paid enough to have shelter.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“It turns out if you give money to a broke, scrappy, loudmouth punk kid from Fresno, she wants to use that money to take care of her community in whatever way possible, including getting them into stable housing.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money