Coffeeland Quotes

“Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws—sacred, inviolable, unchangeable—cause panics which no one could prevent,” Roosevelt said. “But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”
― Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug

“Most often hunger is understood to be a consequence of economic crisis or catastrophe—a famine, for example. In fact hunger is the bedrock foundation of all capitalist economies, though in some the bottom is far enough away that it usually remains invisible. The standard account of the relationship between hunger and work under capitalism focuses on land privatization. In principle, after common resources have been transformed into private property, the only way to eat is to sell labor in the market in exchange for a wage, and then spend that wage buying food. By this account, capitalism operates through a kind of economic deism: land privatization starts a clock on hunger that ticks away each working day.”
― Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug

“Історична батьківщина рослини, яка по-ботанічному називається Coffea arabica, — Ефіопія. Просто в XVI–XVII століттях кавою монопольно торгували арабські купці з єменського узбережжя Червоного моря, а в ту добу флорі давали латинські назви.”
― Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug

“...means the destruction of our nation just as surely as it
meant the destruction of Egypt and Rome and Spain and Germany and all the other nations who came to
measure their greatness by their material possessions rather than by their passion for justice.”
― Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug

“Complicating the work further was the fact that Latin American buyers were known to have a taste for the world’s finest things even when they could not afford to pay the world’s highest prices. As a result, European manufacturers “sought constantly to improve one element of quality, that of finish, whilst at the same time avoiding parallel improvements in other elements, notably in fineness.”
― Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug