Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

Entrepreneurial profit... is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production in exactly the same sense that wages are the value expression of what the worker "produces." It is not a profit of exploitation any more than are wages.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

Joseph Schumpeter
Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

Joseph Schumpeter
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Joseph Schumpeter
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 standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.

Joseph Schumpeter
Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Joseph Schumpeter
Why do entrepreneurs appear, not continuously, that is singly in every appropriately chosen interval, but in clusters? Exclusively because the appearance of one or a few entrepreneurs facilitates the appearance of others, and these the appearance of more, in ever-increasing numbers.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

Joseph Schumpeter
As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was.

Joseph Schumpeter
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.

Joseph Schumpeter
In economic life competition is never completely lacking, but hardly ever is it perfect.

Joseph Schumpeter
Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

Joseph Schumpeter
The innovation is hazardous, impossible for most producers. But if someone establishes a business having regard to this source of supply, and everything goes well, then he can produce a unit of product more cheaply, while at first the existing prices substantially continue to exist. He then makes a profit. Again he has contributed nothing but will and action, has done nothing but recombine existing factors. Again he is an entrepreneur, his profit entrepreneurial profit. And again the latter, and also the entrepreneurial function as such, perish in the vortex of the competition which streams after them. The case of the choice of new trade routes belongs here.

Joseph Schumpeter
The great political questions take their place in the psychic economy of the typical citizen with those leisure-hour interests that have not yet attained the rank of hobbies, and with the subjects of irresponsible conversation.

Joseph Schumpeter
When we inquire about the general forms of economic phenomena, about their uniformities, or about a key to understanding them, we ipso facto indicate that we wish at that moment to consider them as something to be investigated, to be sought for, as the unknown ; and that we wish to trace them to the relatively known, just as any science deals with its object of inquiry.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

Joseph Schumpeter
Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters-perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair-may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple a that.

Joseph Schumpeter
The cold 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.

Joseph Schumpeter
To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

Joseph Schumpeter
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 may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.

Joseph Schumpeter
Only a few people have these qualities of leadership and only a few in such a situation, that is a situation which is not itself already a boom, can succeed in this direction. However, if one or a few have advanced with success many of the difficulties disappear. Others can then follow these pioneers, as they will clearly do under the stimulus of the success now attainable. Their success again makes it easier, through the increasingly complete removal of the obstacles analysed in the second chapter, for more people to follow suit, until finally the innovation becomes familiar and the acceptance of it a matter of free choice.

Joseph Schumpeter
The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process

Joseph Schumpeter