27 Quotes by Robert Heilbroner

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

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.

As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.

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

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.

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

One accumulates or one gets accumulated.

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.

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.