Famously Said Random quote

David Graeber — Portrait after a picture by Guido van Nispen from amsterdam, the netherlands (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

The quotations of

David Graeber

American anthropologist and anarchist

1961–2020

6 quotes, most often on Economics, Work and Money.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.
“Bullshit Jobs,” August 2013
- Work
Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.
Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press: 2009), p. 203
- Freedom
- Power
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, “1971–The Beginning…”, p. 391
- Economics
- Money
Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! (2000)
- Morality
- Politics
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, “Age of the Great Capitalist Empires”, p. 350
- Economics
- Work
In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Two, “The Myth of Barter”, p. 40
- History
- Money

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