“ The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasse… David Graeber
“ When an economist attempts to prove that it is irrational to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because th… David Graeber
“ There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic struct… David Graeber
“ I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so… David Graeber
“ Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the i… David Graeber
“ While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it a… David Graeber
“ If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have r… David Graeber
“ Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presente… David Graeber
“ The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its leg… David Graeber
“ So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can b… David Graeber
“ Insofar as we have freedoms, it’s not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It’s because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms—by doing exactly what we’re doing h… David Graeber
“ Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because the… David Graeber
“ As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of two sorts of people: "politicians," who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally… David Graeber
“ Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds - or rather, where every day it's more d… David Graeber
“ Yet for some reason, we as a society havecollectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years oftheir lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for… David Graeber
“ Most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel… David Graeber
“ The real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That, David Graeber
“ This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) i… David Graeber
“ Honor is Surplus Dignity: Honor, at its simplest, is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword. Wherever honor is at issue, it comes with a sense that dignity can be lost, and… David Graeber
“ Tally sticks were quite explicitly IOUs: both parties to a transaction would take a hazelwood twig, notch it to indicate the amount owed, and then split it in half. The creditor would keep one half, c… David Graeber
