Robert Heilbroner

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

— Robert Heilbroner

It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to himself he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.Nothing could be further from the truth.

— Robert Heilbroner

Nobody wanted this commercialization of life.

— Robert Heilbroner

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

— 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.

— Robert Heilbroner

David Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly to the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then kicked back down to the bottom.

— Robert Heilbroner

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

— Robert Heilbroner

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

— Robert Heilbroner

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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Robert Heilbroner

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

— Robert Heilbroner

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

— Robert Heilbroner

Keynes disdained inside information — in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information — and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading.

— Robert Heilbroner

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

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Robert Heilbroner

History, as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Robert Heilbroner

The total amount of electric power generated by India would not suffice to light up New York City.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Robert Heilbroner

For it is certain that the future will bring realities for which our traditional optimism fails to prepare us and against which our economic momentum fails to arm us.

— Robert Heilbroner

The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life.

— Robert Heilbroner

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