Aging & Wisdom Quote by Daniel De Leon

De Leon writes like a man watching a wrecking ball swing and deciding the crime isn’t collateral damage but the tool itself. His target isn’t “greed” in the abstract; it’s capitalism as an engine that turns every non-economic value into scrap or merchandise. The phrasing is deliberately moralized: “finer sentiments,” “human heart,” “sacred.” He’s not offering a neutral diagnosis of markets. He’s staging a trial, casting capitalism as a force that doesn’t merely ignore human tenderness, community memory, or spiritual meaning, but actively “attacks and destroys” them.

The rhetorical trick is the escalation from intimate to civilizational. Start with feelings, move to “old traditions and ideas,” end with the desecration of the sacred. That widening circle suggests capitalism’s reach is total: it colonizes the private self, then the shared culture, then the last protected zones where societies store meaning. The verb choice matters: “ruthlessly sweeps away” implies speed and inevitability, as if resistance is quaint. “Exploits and corrupts” adds the darker claim that capitalism doesn’t just eliminate sacred things; it keeps their shells and sells them back, emptied of purpose.

Context sharpens the bite. De Leon was a Marxist labor leader in the Gilded Age and early industrial America, when mass production, urbanization, and corporate consolidation were remaking work and daily life. The subtext is organizing propaganda with philosophical teeth: if capitalism destroys what people love and rebrands what they revere, then fighting it becomes not only an economic demand but a defense of dignity, memory, and moral reality.