Joseph A. Schumpeter Quotes

46 quotes in 735 categories

• 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,…
• Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.
• It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the…
• The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process
• The perennial gale of creative destruction
• The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily - and perhaps most tellingly - described in terms of the genesis of the…
• It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from…
• 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…
• The modern mind dislikes gold because it blurts out unpleasant truths.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
• In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life…
• Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.
• Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they…
• 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…
• Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.
• 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…

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