Joseph Alois Schumpeter Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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 Alois Schumpeter

#3. 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

#4. 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 Alois Schumpeter

#5. This may have something to do with a tendency to discount the cost or quality advantages of quasi-monopolist combination that is at present as pronounced as was the exaggeration of them in the typical prospectus or announcement of sponsors of such combinations.]

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

#6. To begin with, convinced socialists will derive satisfaction from the mere fact of living in a socialist society.4 Socialist bread may well taste sweeter to them than capitalist bread simply because it is socialist bread, and it would do so even if they found mice in it.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

#7. Wherever autocratic power vanished at an early date - as in the Netherlands and later in England - and the protective interest receded into the background, they swiftly discovered that trade must be free - free to the nethermost recesses of hell.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

#8. Voters thereby prove themselves bad and indeed corrupt judges of such issues and often they even prove themselves bad judges of their own long-run interests, for it is only the short-run promise that tells politically and only short-run rationality that asserts itself effectively.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

#9. 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

#10. 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 Alois Schumpeter

#11. History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

#12. Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter