Anti Fur Quotes

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

Fur dressing, the application of chemicals to stop fur and skin from rotting in your wardrobe, is rated as one of the world’s five worst industries for toxic metal pollution.

the ide­o­log­i­cal defense of “pri­vate prop­erty” is both vague and mis­lead­ing. The seizure, or even abo­li­tion of pri­vate prop­erty doesn’t refer to the water bot­tles or homes that many of us have pur­chased; pri­vate prop­erty in the con­text of anti-capitalist pol­i­tics refers to the own­er­ship by bosses and land­lords of the resources peo­ple need to sur­vive. Most peo­ple have no access to the tools and sup­plies required to build their own fur­ni­ture, pro­vide all their own food, or main­tain a home entirely on their own. In a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety, we depend on the mar­ket to pro­vide these for us in exchange for money. We work waged jobs, where we receive only a por­tion of the value we add to the com­modi­ties we pro­duce, and go into debt in order to afford them. When anti-capitalists talk about pri­vate prop­erty, they’re not refer­ring to the pos­ses­sions con­sumers have pur­chased in order to live; they’re refer­ring to those pos­ses­sions that the wealthy have accu­mu­lated in order to rent or sell to those who must work a waged job to survive.

My relations and friends were too stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. They didn’t rush to get rid of their money (that was what the Jews and the Germans did). All my relations thought it would stop the next week - and they went on thinking so. They woke up very late. They started selling their valuables because they couldn’t buy food - the china from the mantelpiece, the furniture, the silver. That made them think - it made them think when the price of a set of old silver spoons went up from 20,000 to 40,000 crowns in a matter of a week or two. And if you had to sell a valuable writing desk for money which was worth only half as much a week later, of course there was ill-feeling. It was resented when Jews bought these things. The Jewish women would turn up at parties or at thé dansants when we were all broke, wearing the silver fox furs - three at a time for ostentation - and diamonds which they had bought from our relations for a song - or what, when they saw them again, had become a song. My relations didn’t know the value of anything. They were stupid. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice - he didn’t know what he was talking about either. Anti-Semitism had been negligible before inflation. Although Bela Kun’s revolution had been mainly run by Jews, the White Terror had largely purged political resentment. The Jews had been badly treated in Hungary since the 1860s, and were not received socially for many years. Nine out of ten bore grudges, and when the opportunity of impressing the arrogant gentiles arrived at last, who was to blame them for taking it? When they made a success of inflation, they were hated. When they