Best 66 quotes of Joseph A. Schumpeter on MyQuotes

Access to the national dividend is usually to be had only on condition of some productive service previously rendered or of some product previously sold. This condition is, in this case, not yet fulfilled. It will be fulfilled only after the successful completion of the new combinations. Hence this credit will in the meantime affect the price level.

All we can thus far say about the duration of the units of [the business cycle] and each of [its] two phases is that it will depend on the nature of the particular innovations that carry a cycle,... and the financial conditions and habits prevailing in the business community in each case.

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.

At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.

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

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

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.

Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

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.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.

For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.

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.

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.

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

I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people's lives.

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

Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.

Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.

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.

I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.

It is, after all, only common sense to realize that, but for the fact that economic life is a process of incessant internal change, the business cycle, as we know it, would not exist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.

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

Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.

Profit is the payment you get when you take advantage of change.

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

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.

Surely, nothing can be more plain or even more trite common sense than the proposition that innovation [...] is at the center of practically all the phenomena, difficulties, and problems of economic life in capitalist society.

The ballot is stronger than bullets.

The banker, therefore, is not so much primarily a middleman in the commodity "purchasing power" as a producer of this commodity. However, since all reserve funds and savings today usually flow to him, and the total demand for free purchasing power, whether existing or to be created, concentrates on him, he has either replaced private capitalists or become their agent; he has himself become the capitalist par excellence.

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.

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.

The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.

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

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.

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.

The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism.

The 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.

The modern mind dislikes gold because it blurts out unpleasant truths.

The perennial gale of creative destruction

There is another method of obtaining money... It does not presuppose the existence of accumulated results of previous development, and hence may be considered as the only one which is available in strict logic. This method of obtaining money is the creation of purchasing power by banks. The form it takes is immaterial.

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.