David Harvey Quotes

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. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. 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 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.

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

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

Cities begin to use cultural production as a way to market their city as being unique and special. Of course, the problem with this is that much of culture is very easy to replicate. The uniqueness begins to disappear. Then, we have what I call the "Disneyfication" of society.

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

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

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

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.

People must get active; go outside; get moving. This is a crucial time. You know, massive wealth and capital haven't budged one bit, so far. We have to give it a huge push if we want to see something different in our society. We need to create mechanisms and forms of organization which reflect the needs and wants of society as a whole, not just a privileged-oligarchic class of individuals.

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.

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

Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.

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

We're supposed to live under capitalism, and capitalism is supposed to be competitive so you would expect that capitalists and entrepreneurs would like competition. Well, it turns out that capitalists do everything they can to avoid competition.

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.

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

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

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

Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.

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

Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.

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.

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.