ROBERT HEILBRONER

Politicians reach high and stoop low to get elected. Unfortunately, there has been more stooping than reaching as of late.

History, as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.

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.

it is certain that the future will bring realities for which our traditional optimism fails to prepare us and against which our economic momentum fails to arm us.

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.

Economic freedom is a highly desirable state -- but in bust and boom we must be prepared to face the its consequences.

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

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 was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

… one accumulates or one gets accumulated.

… 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.

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. Later on, a Henry Ford might introduce an era of intensely production-minded captains of industry, but the Harrimans, Morgans, Fricks, and Rockefellers were far more interested in the exciting manipulation of huge masses of intangible wealth than in the humdrum business of turning out goods.

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.

Veblen once asked a religious student the value of her church in kegs of beer.

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

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

We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it.

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

Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth.

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

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

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.

Growth is the mantra of our society because the economy can't remain healthy without growth.Impregnable monopolies aside (and these are few), profits are both the hallmark of capitalism and its Achilles heel, for no business can permanently maintain its prices much above its costs. There is only one way in which profits can be perpetuated; a business-or an entire economy-must grow.