Madeline Pendleton > Quotes

“1. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. 2. If you want to survive, remember to secure your own oxygen mask before securing the oxygen masks of others. 3. Whatever you do, though, don’t forget about the others.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“We’re all just doing our best to get by; sometimes you’re on the giving end, other times you’re on the receiving end.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“You don’t get anything you want in life by keeping what you want a secret.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“In 2019, Microsoft Japan implemented a four-day workweek without reducing pay for its workers. The result? Productivity increased 40 percent.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The commodification of housing is an evil that will never make sense to me. How have we let greed go so far that the very things we need to stay alive, things like shelter, have become reduced to commodities for the rich to profit from while the rest of us struggle?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Drew loved to learn about physics and space. It made him feel small and insignificant, but in a way that eased some of the pressure he felt about needing to make it in today’s dystopian soul-crushing world.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Was life really an endless string of being bounced around from company to company, from Owner to Owner, being seen as a line item on a balance sheet—a number to get as low as possible to maximize profits?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“It’s amazing how much extra cash flow is freed up when one person isn’t hoarding all the money at the top.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Wage labor is all exploitation in the end. We’re coerced into accepting employment because we’ll die if we don’t. There’s no choice there. There’s barely even an illusion of choice.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“As long as there has been money, there has been debt. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have either, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We live here, now.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“why should the people on top make the most money when the people on the bottom do the most work?”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“If love is to understand someone and be understood by them, as I’ve always suspected, it’s possible there were no two people more in love in the history of the world than Drew and me.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“In 2021, 73 percent of Americans ranked financial issues as their number one cause of stress—above politics, work, or family—and these numbers are highest in Generation Z and Millennials, with over 80 percent of people born after 1980 reporting that they find their finances to be a source of stress.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Millennials might have been the first generation in U.S. history to collectively realize that capitalism was built on a house of cards, while the rich took bets on when and how it would fall.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Nothing in capitalism is easy.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The minimum wage today is worth 31 percent less than it was in 1968. By contrast, housing prices have more than doubled when adjusted for inflation.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“We went home that night and fell asleep in each other’s arms. “I love you,” he told me before we went to bed, kissing me on the forehead. The next morning, I woke up, and Drew was gone. In the canyon by our house, he’d shot himself in the heart.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Don't listen if anyone ever tells you it's a dog-eat-dog world. Dogs are pack animals. We're stronger together.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Real estate investors want to create a nation of renters, and it’s easy to see why: there’s massive profit in price-gouging people for rent.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“I sat down with a notebook and wrote down my plan for the future: 1. pay off my debt 2. save a down payment for a house 3. plan for my retirement 4. help everyone I care about do the same”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Don’t feel bad about owing money to a bank. They’re evil bloodsucking mega-corporations and they don’t care about us.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“This was a massive government failure. Individual people shouldn’t be tasked with keeping me safe. I pay a government to do that. Instead, the government used my money to let a million people die from COVID and increase the military budget to kill more people in different parts of the world.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Many racked up six figures of student loan debt for a degree they never even completed.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“My dad is the kind of guy everyone in town knows. In the Tower District, we have a term for that: “Fresno Famous.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“The stakes are high, and if you lose, it might come for you in ways you’d never expect.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“I used to walk to that gas station all the time,”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“If capitalism is a joke, maybe Fresno is the punch line.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“He brought light to everything he touched, shooting through our stratosphere, crashing into our world. All we could do is grab hold and hang on for the ride.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“When we expand our understanding of homelessness to include all facets of it and not just the cases that are the most severe, we begin to see the housing crisis take shape in the United States.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

“Everything I learned about survival, I learned from the people around me in Fresno.”
― Madeline Pendleton, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money