Cooperatives Quotes

A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The colored population voluntarily sustain several churches, schools, and mutual assistance and improvement societies, and there are evidently persons among them of no inconsiderable cultivation of mind.

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

Establishment at public expense of rural depots for the most improved agricultural machinery, to be lent out to the agricultural population at a rent covering cost and management alone.

We have to deal with where we are. We have to create cooperatives, we have to create intentional communities, we have to work for local cooperation where we are.

All those who controlled the moneyed institutions of the state either did not choose to do business with us, or they feared the ill will of a certain class of businessmen who considered their interests antagonistic to those of our order.

In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.

Italy is in truth a poor country with a population which does not all find employment in its native land--whence the phenomenon of emigration. She also possesses large numbers of intellectual proletarians who have got to eat even if they find no employment after graduation from school. It is, therefore, only too explicable that there has had to be a social policy leading to the creation of numerous officials, some of which may be noxious to the development of certain branches of national activity. For the same reason it was natural in a country with moderate capitalist enterprise that laws should be enacted favoring cooperation. Thus we came to have thousands upon thousands of cooperative enterprises in Italy …

Security was the demand which set in motion labour movements in history; trade unions, friendly societies, consumer cooperatives were all about compensating for the impotence of individual resistance.

There are large cooperatives all across this country. Land O'Lakes is a $12 billion club functioning all across America. There are rural electric co-ops in 47 states. Ace Hardware is a cooperative.

The company has always been one of the great mysteries of capitalism: liberals and socialists have never known quite what to think about it. The company is collectivist and co-operative, based on hierarchy, bureaucracy and planning rather than individualism, competition and exchange. Companies appear as little islands of socialism in the market sea.