David Harvey Quotes

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.

The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism.

But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.

The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.

Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium.

The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.

Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.

The accumulation of capital involves the expansion of value over time.

The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.

My advice to everybody would be to go out as much as possible and deal with social inequality and environmental degradation because these issues are increasingly prescient.

There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.

The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.

Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.

Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale.

All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe.

Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute rather than to generate wealth and income.

Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.

If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, then capitalism is not long for this world.

The social relations of capitalism have penetrated slowly into all spheres of life to make wage labour the general condition of existence only in fairly recent times.

Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class.

The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.

There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.

Capital creates space-time.

The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.

Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism.

When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.

Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.

Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.

The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.