Robert Heilbroner Quotes

If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

Veblen once asked a religious student the value of her church in kegs of beer.

If one could divine the nature of the economic forces in the world, one could foretell the future.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort , dignity , and personal advance is only a myth , or worse, a bitter mockery.

We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place.

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

Socialism has been a great tragedy this century.

The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also brought mortis.

History , as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.

One accumulates or one gets accumulated.

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.

Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits .

Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.

In the periods of crisis, the bigger firms absorb the smaller ones,and when the industrial monsters eventually go down, the wreckage is far greater than when the little enterprises buckle.

Today and over the foreseeable future,traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover.

We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.

Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.

Stalinism is a pathology of socialism, Hitlerism being the apposite example for capitalism.

We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it.

Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth.

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece.