60 Quotes by David Korten

As long as you have a system that is based on the rational that if you are making money you are thereby making a contribution to society, these financial rogue practices will continue.

The current system is organized around financial values over life values. We need to shift that locus of power down to the community level because the financial markets recognize only money and thereby only financial values.

Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.

To create a world in which life can flourish and prosper we must replace the values and institutions of capitalism with values and institutions that honor life, serve life's needs, and restore money to its proper role as servant. I believe we are in fact being called to take a step to a new level of species consciousness and function.

When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.

If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth.

There was a time in the United States when most of our financial institutions were local. Which essentially meant that local communities were able to create their own credit, or their own money, in response to their own needs. We still depended on banks, but it was a much more democratic process.

The fact is that these bankers and traders are taking claims of wealth out of the system; they are not doing any productive work.

What I would tell the Europeans, but also the Asians and the Latin Americans, is: keep the excesses of Wall Street out of your system.