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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
Political
Arrangements
Ends
Hence
Certain
Incapable
Decisions
Administrative
Method
Institutional
Type
Legislative
Democracy
Arrangement
Decision
Arriving

More quotes by Joseph A. Schumpeter

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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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 capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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We always plan too much and always think too little.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter