capital quotes

What a finething capital punishment is! Dead mennever repent; dead men never bring awkward stories to light. Ah, it's a finething for thetrade! Five of 'emstrung up ina row; and none left to play booty, or turn white-livered!

- CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
^9  Fagin. Oliver Twist, ch.9.

The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder.

- Geoffrey Francis Fisher, Baron Fisher (of Lambeth)
  In the Sunday Times, 24 Feb.

Does capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; and it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that property is of greater value than life.

- Elizabeth Fry
Quoted in Rachel E Cresswell and Katharine Fry Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry (1848).

Canadian nationalism was systematically encouraged and exploited by American capital.Canada moved from colony to nation to colony.

- Harold Adams Innis
  'Great Britain, the United States and Canada', collected in Mary Quayle Innis (ed) Essays in Canadian Economic History (1956).

Late one morning, I awoke in the capital of a certain countryand found myselfnot changed overnight into a large brown beetle, nor feeling exactly on top of the worldmerely ready to go home.

-Takeshi Kaiko
  'The Crushed Pellet', in Five Thousand Runaways (translated by Cecilia Segawa Seigle).

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise.But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

-John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes (of Tilton)
  The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

High office teaches decision-making, not substance. It Klee consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered: they learn how to make decisions, but not what decisions to make.

- HenryAlfred Kissinger
  The White HouseYears.

   If capital isgrowing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
  'Wage Labour and Capital', collected in Robert C  Tucker (ed)  The Marx^Engels Reader (2nd edn,1972), p.211.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

-John Stuart Mill
 Principles of Political Economy, with Some Applications to Social Philosophy.

Pandemonium, the high capital Of Satan and his peers.

-John Milton
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.756^7.

To that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais, stanza 7.

This rortie wretched city Sair come down frae its auld hiechts The hauf o't smug, complacent, Lost til all pride of race or spirit, The tither wild and rouch as ever In its secret hairt But lost alsweill, the smeddum tane, The man o'independent mind has cap in hand the day Sits on its craggy spine And drees the wind and rain That nourished all its genius Weary wi centuries This empty capital snorts like a great beast Caged in its sleep, dreaming of freedom.

- Sydney Goodsir Smith
  Of Edinburgh.'Kynd Kittock's Land' (Kynd Kittock is a character in the poetry of the16c Scottish poetWilliam Dunbar.) rortie=splendid, smeddum=spirit, drees=endures.

The capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.

-Tobias George Smollett
  Of London. Letter from Matthew Bramble, 29 May, Humphrey Clinker, vol.1.

You can see in pantomime the puppets fumbling with their slips of paper†seethem pickup their phone†see the noiseless, ceaseless capital of memoranda, in touch with Calcutta, in touch with Reykjavik, and always fooling with something.

- E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
  On office windows at twilight. Here Is NewYork.