Quote

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.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

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Joseph A. Schumpeter
Age: 67 †
Born: 1883
Born: February 8
Died: 1950
Died: June 21
Anthropologist
Book Collector
Economist
Jurist
Political Scientist
Professor
Mexico City
Mexico
Josef Aloys Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Method
Institutional
Type
Legislative
Democracy
Arrangement
Decision
Arriving
Political
Arrangements
Ends
Hence
Certain
Incapable
Decisions
Administrative

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Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?
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Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
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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.
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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.
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Those revolutions are not strictly incessant they occur in discrete rushes which are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet. The process as a whole works incessantly however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles.
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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.
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Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones
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To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.
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The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism.
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For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.
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The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
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Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.
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The perennial gale of creative destruction
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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.
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Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.
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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.
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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.
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