27 Quotes by Robert Heilbroner

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

There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

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

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.

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.

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

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.

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.

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