Joseph A. Schumpeter Quotes

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.

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.

The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.

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.

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

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

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

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

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.

Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?

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

Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.

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.

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.

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.

The ballot is stronger than bullets.

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

Want and effective demand are not the same thing. If they were, the poorest nations would be the ones to display the most vigorous demand.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

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.

The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

The trouble with Russia is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia.

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

Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment.

There exists no more democratic institution than the market

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.

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 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 very foundation of private property and free contracting wears away in a nation in which its most vital, most concrete, most meaningful types of private property and free contracting disappear from the moral horizon of the people.

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.

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.

We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.

The success of everything depends on intuition, the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of grasping the essential fact, discarding the unessential, even though one can give no account of the principles by which this is done.

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

The strategic stimulus to economic development in Schumpeter's analysis is innovation, defined as the commercial or industrial application of something new
a new product, process or method of production, a new market or source of supply, a new form of commercial, business or financial organization.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

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.