Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

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The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort.

Joseph Schumpeter
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 and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved.

Joseph Schumpeter
The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.

Joseph Schumpeter
Gentlemen, a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.

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
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 not.

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
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
Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?

Joseph Schumpeter
Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

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 religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a Faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is disapproved of not only intellectually but also morally. There cannot be any excuse for it once the Message has been revealed.

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
Every piece of business strategy. must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.

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

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
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
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 ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense....

Joseph Schumpeter
The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily – ; and perhaps most tellingly – described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit.

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

Joseph Schumpeter
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.

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

Joseph Schumpeter
Early in life I had three ambitions: to be the greatest economist in the world, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the best lover in Vienna. Well, in one of those goals I have failed.

Joseph Schumpeter