Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones
The ballot is stronger than bullets.
Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.
The perennial gale of creative destruction
Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.
Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.
At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.
We always plan too much and always think too little.
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.
Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
There exists no more democratic institution than the market
The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.
Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.
Profit is the payment you get when you take advantage of change.
Gentlemen, a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.
The modern mind dislikes gold because it blurts out unpleasant truths.
The trouble with Russia is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia.
Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.
Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
In economic life competition is never completely lacking, but hardly ever is it perfect.
Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.
Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.
The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process
Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment.
The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism.
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.
Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?
For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.
Want and effective demand are not the same thing. If they were, the poorest nations would be the ones to display the most vigorous demand.
Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.
The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.
I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people's lives.
To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.
Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.
The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily - and perhaps most tellingly - described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit.
Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.
This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.
To the believer Marxism presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions.
It is, after all, only common sense to realize that, but for the fact that economic life is a process of incessant internal change, the business cycle, as we know it, would not exist.
For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.
We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.
Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.
I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.
The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort.
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political — legislative and administrative — decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.
