Robert Heilbroner Quotes

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

The book was called Imperialism; it was a devastating volume. For here was the most important and searing criticism which had ever been levied against the profit system. The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world. He saw the process of imperialism as a relentless and restless tendency of capitalism to rescue itself from a self-imposed dilemma, a tendency that necessarily involved foreign commercial conquest and that thereby inescapably involved a constant risk of war. No more profound moral indictment of capitalism had ever been posed.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have.