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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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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
Ones
Vision
Erudite
Public
Pessimistic
Almost
Visions
Anything
Strike
Always
Optimistic
Investing
Strikes

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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.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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.
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The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
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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.
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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
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The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.
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 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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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?
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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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.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.
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Gentlemen, a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
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Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
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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 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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For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.
Joseph A. Schumpeter