This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.

Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.

We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.

What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.

Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We've seen only the tiniest beginnings of that.

We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.

There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.

How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.

Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.

There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.

I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.

What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.

I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.

The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.

Subsidize... or lend.

The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?

The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.

I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.

What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.

What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right?

There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production.

The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.

Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.

I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

Markets can't think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.

Debt is such a powerful tool it is such a useful tool its much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army without having a whole administration.

As the rich consume more and more they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

If you cut down a forest it doesnt matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

The best thanks we could offer those who went before and raised the Irish working class from their knees was to press forward with determination and enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal of their efforts, a Co-operative Commonwealth for Ireland.

Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.

I once said, "We will bury you," and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

I certainly did feel inferior. Because of class. Because of strength. Because of height. I guess if I'd been able to hit somebody in the nose, I wouldn't have been a comic.

I grew up in Michigan, in a very small town, Centreville. In my graduating class, I had like 92 people.