production quotes

A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature.

-Joseph Addison
  In The Spectator, no.39.

  From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There isgrandeur in this view of life.

- Charles Robert Darwin
  The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ch.14.

The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

- Friedrich Engels
  The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

We call the heroes of the past heroes of production.We feel entitled to call the present day magazine heroes 'idols ofconsumption'.Indeed, almosteveryoneofthem is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time.

- Leo Lowenthal
  'The Triumph of Mass Idols', collected in Literature and Mass Culture (1984).

   Assume a particular state of development in the productive facilities of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil societyand you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
  Letter to P  V Annenkov, 26 Dec.

The product of mental laboursciencealways stands far below its value, because the labour-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labour-time required for its original production.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
  Theory of Surplus Value.

  The production of surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus labour, is the specific end and aim, the sum and 558 substance, of capitalist production.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
  Das Kapital.

What I did that was new was to prove that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and that dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence (1934).

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
'Minority Report'. Collected in Notebooks (1956).

Unlike the Laws of Production, those of Distribution are partly of human institution, since the manner in which wealth is distributed in any given society, depends on the statutes or usages therein obtaining.

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

Political economy (the economyof a State, orofcitizens) consists simply in the production, preservation, and distribution, at fittest time and place, of useful or pleasurable things.

-John Ruskin
  Unto this Last, essay 2.

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.

- Adam Smith
  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of theWealth of Nations, bk.4, ch.8.

If socialists lose sight of the central importance of social ownership of the means of production, they will cease, in a very real sense, to be socialists at all: they will subside into the role of well-intentioned, amiable, rootless, drifting social reformers.

- (Evelyn) John Strachey
  Contemporary Capitalism.