Robert Heilbroner Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Robert Heilbroner
The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
But despite the clarion words of the Manifesto, the demonic note was not a call for a revolution of communism; it was a cry born only of frustration and despair.

Robert Heilbroner
To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

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
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
Today and over the foreseeable future, traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover.

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 great economists] can be called the worldly philosophers, for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities—his drive for wealth.

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