The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece. - Robert Heilbroner

But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses.

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.

He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter.