Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.

War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.

The munitions manufacturers and the war lords are in the saddle.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

Like all wars, conflicts bring on great opportunities for business.

The only neutral parties in a war are those who are making money from it.

War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

Many powerful people don't want peace, because they live off war.

I think that one of the things that we all ask ourselves, whoever we are, is: who stands to make a lot of money out of this [wars]? And, certainly, it comes back to people like armaments makers, and so on and so forth.

War is good business Invest your son

War what is it good for? It's good for business.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour.

We don't supply a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons to the war criminals in Saudi Arabia nor do we supply eight million dollars a day to the Israeli army that is also violating international law and human rights.