Top 67 Schumpeter Quotes
#1. Schumpeter may well have seen singles as rational. but in a survey of Americans conducted in 1957, more than half the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick", "immoral", or "neurotic," while about a third viewed them "neutrally".
Eric Klinenberg
#2. As far as our propositions are certain, they do not say anything about reality, and as far as they do say anything about reality, they are not
certain"
Albert Einstein (as cited in Schumpeter, 1991)
Albert Einstein
#3. The very foundation of private property and free contracting wears away in a nation in which its most vital, most concrete, most meaningful types of private property and free contracting disappear from the moral horizon of the people.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#4. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#5. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare - all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#6. 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
#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. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#17. Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#23. History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
#25. Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#26. Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#27. 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 ...
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#28. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#29. Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#30. Surely, nothing can be more plain or even more trite common sense than the proposition that innovation [ ... ] is at the center of practically all the phenomena, difficulties, and problems of economic life in capitalist society.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#31. Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#33. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#34. Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters-perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair-may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple a that.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#36. All we can thus far say about the duration of the units of [the business cycle] and each of [its] two phases is that it will depend on the nature of the particular innovations that carry a cycle, ... and the financial conditions and habits prevailing in the business community in each case.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#37. It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#39. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#40. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#41. The trouble with Russia is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#42. For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#43. 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
#44. It is quite possible that future generations will look upon arguments about the inferiority of the socialist plan as we look upon Adam Smith's argument about joint stock companies which, also, were simply false.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#45. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#47. The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#50. Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#51. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#53. The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#54. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#55. Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#56. Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#57. It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense ...
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#58. 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
#60. Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#64. Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#65. In economic life competition is never completely lacking, but hardly ever is it perfect.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#66. Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#67. 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
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