Top 50 David Harvey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— David Harvey

2. “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.”

— David Harvey

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3. “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.”

— David Harvey

4. “There is, in short, no ‘spatial fix’ that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

6. “Capital creates space-time .”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

11. “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.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

13. “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 .”

— David Harvey

14. “There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

18. “As Marx amusingly put it elsewhere, in boom economies everybody acts like a Protestant – they act on pure faith. When the crash comes, though, everyone dives for cover in the “Catholicism” of the monetary base, real gold.”

— David Harvey

19. “Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.”

— David Harvey

20. “It is therefore only at the money moment – the moment of capitalist universality – that we can tell where we are in relation to value and surplus-value.”

— David Harvey

21. “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

— David Harvey

22. “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.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

24. “The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.”

— David Harvey

25. “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.”

— David Harvey

26. “The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

28. “The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

32. “Marx inverted Hegel’s dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

34. “Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital .”

— David Harvey

35. “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.”

— David Harvey

36. “Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites.”

— David Harvey

37. “Once you can hang a price tag on something, you can in principle put a price tag on anything, including conscience and honor, to say nothing of body parts and children.”

— David Harvey

38. “If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

40. “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.”

— David Harvey

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

— David Harvey

42. “For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process – a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.”

— David Harvey

43. “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.”

— David Harvey

44. “Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities.”

— David Harvey

45. “We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.”

— David Harvey

46. “The accumulation of money as unlimited social power is an essential feature of a capitalist mode of production. When people seek to accumulate that social power, they start to behave in a very different way. Once the universal equivalent becomes a representation of all socially necessary labor-time, the potentialities for further accumulation are limitless.”

— David Harvey

47. “Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call ‘ruinous’ competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers.”

— David Harvey

48. “This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx’s supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.”

— David Harvey

49. “The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholders’ returns, on the one hand, and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged.”

— David Harvey

50. “Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises.”

— David Harvey