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GREAT QUOTES OF SCHUMPETER
“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie” - Joseph Schumpeter
“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.” - Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter
“History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.” - Joseph Schumpeter
“Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved.” - Joseph A. Schumpeter
“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.” - Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter
“Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ...” - Joseph A. Schumpeter
“Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behavior more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.” - Joseph A. Schumpeter
“Nothing should be more obvious than that the business organism cannot function according to design when its most important “parameters of action”—wages, prices, interest—are transferred to the political sphere and there dealt with according to the requirements of the political game or, which sometimes is more serious still, according to the ideas of some planners.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“However, whether favorable or unfavorable, value judgments about capitalist performance are of little interest. For mankind is not free to choose. This is not only because the mass of people are not in a position to compare alternatives rationally and always accept what they are being told. There is a much deeper reason for it. Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do—not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“The public mind has by now so thoroughly grown out of humor with it as to make condemnation of capitalism and all its works a foregone conclusion---almost a requirement of the etiquette of discussion.” - Joseph A. Schumpeter
“As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was. In any case, that democracy will not mean increased personal freedom.” - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
“We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against the caricatures we make of them.” - Joseph A. Schumpeter