90 Quotes by Joseph A. Schumpeter

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.

We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against the caricatures we make of them.

Analysis, whether economic or other, never yields more than a statement about the tendencies present in an observable pattern. And these never tell us what will happen to the pattern but only what would happen if they continued to act as they have been acting in the time interval covered by our observation and if no other factors intruded. “Inevitability” or “necessity” can never mean more than this.

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.

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.

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.

Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones.

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

There exists no more democratic institution than the market.