Quotes by Joseph A. Schumpeter

“The ballot is stronger than bullets.”

“The question that is so clearly in many potential parents minds: Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?”

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

“Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.”

“To the believer [Marxism] presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions . . .”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.