Joseph A. Schumpeter
Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.Collection: Society
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.
Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.
The ballot is stronger than bullets.
Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.
Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.
For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.
At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.Collection: Heart
The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.Collection: Opening Up
Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.Collection: Innovation
Profit is the payment you get when you take advantage of change.Collection: Advantage
Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment.Collection: Intuition
As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.Collection: Opportunity
The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.Collection: Real
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.Collection: Politician
Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.Collection: Weather
Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.Collection: Innovation
Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.Collection: Obvious
We always plan too much and always think too little.Collection: Business
To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.Collection: Men
The success of everything depends on intuition, the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of grasping the essential fact, discarding the unessential, even though one can give no account of the principles by which this is done.Collection: Giving
The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.Collection: Girl
Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.Collection: Creative
I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.Collection: Vienna
The strategic stimulus to economic development in Schumpeter's analysis is innovation, defined as the commercial or industrial application of something new---a new product, process or method of production, a new market or source of supply, a new form of commercial, business or financial organization.Collection: Organization
There exists no more democratic institution than the marketCollection: Institutions
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.Collection: Lying
We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.Collection: Hate
The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary processCollection: Essentials
Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.Collection: Thinking
In economic life competition is never completely lacking, but hardly ever is it perfect.Collection: Perfect
The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.Collection: Holy Grail
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political — legislative and administrative — decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.Collection: Decision
The state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory that construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.Collection: Doctors
Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.Collection: Memories
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.Collection: Doe
The banker, therefore, is not so much primarily a middleman in the commodity "purchasing power" as a producer of this commodity. However, since all reserve funds and savings today usually flow to him, and the total demand for free purchasing power, whether existing or to be created, concentrates on him, he has either replaced private capitalists or become their agent; he has himself become the capitalist par excellence.Collection: Excellence
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.Collection: Meaningful
Those revolutions are not strictly incessant; they occur in discrete rushes which are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet. The process as a whole works incessantly however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Moving
This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.Collection: Eye
There is another method of obtaining money... It does not presuppose the existence of accumulated results of previous development, and hence may be considered as the only one which is available in strict logic. This method of obtaining money is the creation of purchasing power by banks. The form it takes is immaterial.Collection: Doe
All we can thus far say about the duration of the units of [the business cycle] and each of [its] two phases is that it will depend on the nature of the particular innovations that carry a cycle,... and the financial conditions and habits prevailing in the business community in each case.Collection: Business
Access to the national dividend is usually to be had only on condition of some productive service previously rendered or of some product previously sold. This condition is, in this case, not yet fulfilled. It will be fulfilled only after the successful completion of the new combinations. Hence this credit will in the meantime affect the price level.Collection: Successful
To the believer Marxism presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions.Collection: Judging
Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Temperature
Want and effective demand are not the same thing. If they were, the poorest nations would be the ones to display the most vigorous demand.Collection: Would Be