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.

It's great to have two cars and a swimming pool. But there are disappointments. After you've made some money and acquired some things, and after the initial excitement has passed, life goes on, just as bewildering as it always was, and the great problems of life and death once again come to the fore.

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.

Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

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.

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.

One accumulates or one gets accumulated.

Stalinism is a pathology of socialism, Hitlerism being the apposite example for capitalism.

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.

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 .

We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.

Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.

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.

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.

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.