Robert Heilbroner Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

The book was called Imperialism; it was a devastating volume. For here was the most important and searing criticism which had ever been levied against the profit system. The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world.

Robert Heilbroner
When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it.

Robert Heilbroner
But while Ricardo, the economist, walked like a god (although he was a modest and retiring person), Malthus was relegated to a lower status.

Robert Heilbroner
Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

Robert Heilbroner
The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life.

Robert Heilbroner
The total amount of electric power generated by India would not suffice to light up New York City.

Robert Heilbroner
In the periods of crisis, the bigger firms absorb the smaller ones, and when the industrial monsters eventually go down, the wreckage is far greater than when the little enterprises buckle.

Robert Heilbroner
Even today-in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman then most New Deal economists.

Robert Heilbroner
The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

Robert Heilbroner
Keynes disdained inside information — in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information — and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading.

Robert Heilbroner
Karl Marx did not call for an opposition to the forces of history. On the contrary he accepted all of them, the drive of technology, the revolutionizing effects of democratic striving, even the vagaries of capitalism, as being indeed the carriers of a brighter future.

Robert Heilbroner
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.

Robert Heilbroner
For it is certain that the future will bring realities for which our traditional optimism fails to prepare us and against which our economic momentum fails to arm us.

Robert Heilbroner
But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses.

Robert Heilbroner
David Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly to the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then kicked back down to the bottom.

Robert Heilbroner
He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter.

Robert Heilbroner
Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.

Robert Heilbroner
Stalinism is a pathology of socialism, Hitlerism being the apposite example for capitalism.

Robert Heilbroner
We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.

Robert Heilbroner
If one could divine the nature of the economic forces in the world, one could foretell the future.

Robert Heilbroner
There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

Robert Heilbroner
In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

Robert Heilbroner
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.

Robert Heilbroner
It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

Robert Heilbroner
Economic freedom is a highly desirable state — but in bust and boom we must be prepared to face the its consequences.

Robert Heilbroner
Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits.

Robert Heilbroner
But the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old ones.

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

Robert Heilbroner
It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to himself he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Robert Heilbroner
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.

Robert Heilbroner