Keywords Quotes

“Never mind that some children might not want to grow up to run a business, that some might rather be teachers or mechanics, or even nothing in particular just yet; forget that imagination and creativity might be something other than a source of wealth. The cult of entrepreneurship’s commodification of imagination, its celebration of self-sacrifice, and its bootstraps individualism make it a perfect ethic for social disinvestment masquerading as reform and profiteering disguised as charity. Entrepreneurship means that now you’re on your own, kid.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“The language of innovation is often spoken in a tone that betrays a paradoxical combination of grandiose evangelism and task-oriented practicality, an impersonal celebration of technology, and an earnest celebration of aesthetic idiosyncrasies.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“Language (n.) The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“Michael Spence, an NYU economist, the sharing economy’s motive is “exploiting under-utilized resources—be they physical and financial capital or human capital and talent.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“Much of the language of late capitalism imagines workplaces as bodies in virtually every way except as a group of overworked or underpaid ones.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“My own sense, as a teacher, has been that administrators only really begin counting things when they need to justify getting rid of them.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“as a recent article on the camps in the Wall Street Journal put it. “Children are born imaginative, energetic, and willing to take risks,” a reporter noted, “but lose this entrepreneurial spirit.” Children’s imagination and creativity, as it turns out, are merely unrefined pre-professional skills. Not only is children’s free time reconfigured as wasted labor-hours, but education itself is reduced to pre-professionalization.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“Life coaching is built around metaphor’s rhetorical alchemy, which turns something abstract (psychological repression, your underappreciated talents) into something concrete (a box, a magic wand).”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism