90 Quotes by Joseph A. Schumpeter

Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

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 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.

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.

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.

To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.

Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.