Robert Heilbroner quotes

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)
For one who has read the works of Marx it is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
The change began with John Stuart Mill and the Utopians. When Mill pointed out that economics had no ultimate solution to the problem of distribution, that society might do with the fruits of its toil as it saw fit, he introduced into the mechanical calculus of the market a conflicting calculus of moral judgment. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
History, as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock. View quote
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 . View quote
Robert Heilbroner
The total amount of electric power generated by India would not suffice to light up New York City. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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 than most New Deal economists. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter. (Robert Heilbroner)
The basic function of the military - to achieve victory over the enemy - has been rendered obsolete by the fact that "victory" and defeat are almost certain to be achieved simultaneously. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
Economic freedom is a highly desirable state - but in bust and boom we must be prepared to face the its consequences. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses. View quote
Robert Heilbroner
Nobody wanted this commercialization of life. View quote
Robert Heilbroner