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Quotes from The Worldly Philosophers — Robert Heilbroner

1919–2005 United States

← All quotes by Robert Heilbroner

26 quotes

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

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

Nobody wanted this commercialization of life.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

No more profound moral indictment of capitalism had ever been posed.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

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.

The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Heilbroner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.