Dan Cryan > Quotes

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody!”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide

“Discovering Tautologies Logical symbols may be used in combination, which can help us calculate the truth condition of any logically complex sentences. For example, “p v ¬p”, which produces the following Truth Table:   When a formula only has T’s under it in a Truth Table, it means that it is true in all situations. The sentence “Either it is raining or it is not raining” cannot be false. Logicians call this a tautology. In a tautology, one truth follows from another of necessity only because of the logical syntax. So we know that any sentence with the same logical syntax will always be true. This”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide

“The great advantage of the reductio method is that it allows us to tell if a statement is true, even if we do not know how to construct a proof for it. We can tell a statement is true by showing that its negation leads to a contradiction.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide

“Russell’s point is that if the set is a member of itself, then by definition it can’t be a member of itself. But if it is not a member of itself, then it is a member of itself. So it is both a member of itself and not a member of itself. And that is a contradiction. This glaring mistake, allegedly, left Frege a broken man.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide

“only because language has something in common with the world that it can be used to picture the world, so it is only because of logic that our sentences have meaning at all.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide

“Without any legal limit on working hours or minimum wages, the working day lasted for sixteen hours and the pay sufficed for only the most meagre existence. Trade unions began to form, but they could do little as long as labour was unskilled and each worker immediately replaceable by another.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Industry could now exploit raw materials at a pace far beyond the ability of the colonies to provide them. To have available raw materials cheaply and in abundance, the colonies themselves had to be mechanized.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“In Ireland, the Great Famine of 1845–50 was exacerbated by the British government’s insistence on a hands-off approach to managing the economy, with the result that, despite horrendous conditions, Ireland was a net exporter of food during the years of the great hunger. The population reduced by 20–25 per cent – almost 1 in 4 either died or emigrated.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“wealth is power” – not because wealth automatically gives its owner political power, but because it gives him or her control of other people’s labour.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“the British colonies in the West Indies and North America that had helped bankroll this development relied heavily on slave labour to run their sugar and cotton plantations. It is now believed that around 20 million people were taken from their homes in Africa to work as slaves on plantations in British colonies and in the newly independent USA. Over half died on the journey.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Socialism is basically a call for greater equality in political power and the distribution of goods. It managed to rally much of the working class behind it.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Everybody could have everything they wanted, so there would no longer be any real need for class divisions. Capitalism was destined to create the conditions necessary for the coming of the true “end of history”, in which all contradictions disappear. However, for the end of history to come, capitalism must first collapse and make room for true communism. This will necessarily happen, according to Marx, because of the inner workings of capitalism.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“There are three ways to increase profit: expand the market, increase the level of exploitation, and improve the technology so as to make production cheaper.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“This means that workers can expect to get more money as society becomes more advanced, but only because more money is produced. As more of it is produced, it skews the balance of supply vs. demand and so causes inflation – it is as if money itself gets cheaper. So the rate at which wages increase will tend to be the same as the rate of inflation – nominal but never real, in economic terms.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Das Kapital”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The first commercial banks appeared in the late 13th century in Italian towns like Siena. The word comes from banco – Italian for bench – since at first banking services were provided on benches at the town’s centre. But banking does not begin with the Italian merchants – its origins lie with the Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks founded in 1096 to ensure the safe passage of European pilgrims heading to Jerusalem in the aftermath of the First Crusade.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“In the late 1830s, China stepped up its efforts to stop the trade in opium and this led to the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide

“Islam and Capitalism Capitalism continues to spread untouched by all this theorizing, and one of its biggest growth areas is Sharia banking (banking that conforms to Islamic law). Like the Bible, the Koran takes a dim view of charging interest.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The newly formed Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal saw it worthwhile to send Columbus westward and Vasco da Gama southward in search of a naval route to India that would bypass the Muslim-dominated land routes. Spain and Portugal found themselves suddenly with trading options all along the African and Asian coasts, as well as vast and rich new territories in the New World. From the 16th century onwards, international trade offered prospects of wealth far superior to the grain produced by the small feudal fiefs of Europe.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The State of Nature Hobbes took this view of mankind and imagined a time when there was no effective government. He thought that without strong government “the wickedness of bad men also compels good men to have recourse, for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud”. The result is that everyone battles with everyone else for every small advantage. It is, in effect, a war of all against all. Hobbes called this imagined pre-history the “state of nature”.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Ricardo’s second principle is that labour is destined never to become more expensive. From the Labour Theory of Value it follows that all increases in productivity and profit principally happen because labour got cheaper.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The Rothschilds developed the very idea of the international investment bank – they could transfer their funds wherever there was peace and prosperity, and thus enjoy high interest on their investments no matter what the situation was. Importantly, they were happy to fund private and government ventures by lending money. These two factors made them a financial machine of a completely new sort.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The East India Company created the Dutch empire in Indonesia by means of brute force combined with economic pressure.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Amsterdam itself was the greatest trade city in Europe up to the Industrial Revolution, and was home to the first stock exchange and insurance company. The Netherlands is considered by many historians to be the first truly capitalist nation in the world.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Industrialization finally drove the West out of a mercantile economy and into a capitalist one. Before industrialization, the most important factor in determining the wealth of a country was its volume of trade, or exports minus imports. After industrialization, the value of what a country could produce became more important.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The self-correcting nature of the market led Smith to think that we could trust the market to provide what was needed – and the principal obstacle to the market trading freely and fulfilling our needs was government intervention.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The goods produced by labour above what is necessary for survival Marx called the “Surplus Value”.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The wages that workers actually get in exchange for their labour equals only the amount that allows them to survive so as to keep on being exploited, and to raise children to be exploited in the future. Workers who are more skilled and irreplaceable may gain a higher standard of living perhaps, but only because they are worth a lot more to their employers than unskilled labourers. The vast majority of the value produced is always taken as profit by the ruling class, who own the means of production.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Contrary to the popular view, Marx did not predict the formation of communist countries, with which he is so closely identified. Rather, he predicted that capitalism would be utterly successful on a number of fronts.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide