|
c09ad41
|
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.
|
|
leguin
banks
banking
economics
capitalism
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
2fcac26
|
The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.
|
|
work
banks
earnings
leo-tolstoy
railways
monopolies
labor
profits
|
Leo Tolstoy |