Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Establishment of a market economy is seen as mostly involving destruction.

Progress" unstabilizes the economic world, or that it is by virtue of its mechanism a cyclical process.

The great mass of people are incapable of realizing that in economic life nothing is permanent except change. They regard the existing state of affairs as eternal; as it has been so shall it always be.

Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Americans today are blaming globalization for change itself and the pace of change, much of which has little to do with globalization.

Capitalism … has existed for fewer than 300 years. If the entire history of Homo sapiens was a 24-hour day, then capitalism has existed for two minutes … Economic systems come, and economic systems go. No economic system lasts forever. Capitalism is not likely to last forever, either.

Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.

Capitalism had been more revolutionary than any previous social system. It had swept away without scruples old institutions and modes of thought, if they were found to stand in its way.

Those underlings who in all the preceding ages of history had formed the herds of slaves and serfs, of paupers and beggars, became the buying public, for whose favor the businessmen canvass. They are the customers who are “always right,” the patrons who have the power to make poor suppliers rich and rich suppliers poor.

The market economy itself was not a product of violent action—of revolutions—but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term “industrial revolution” are utterly misleading.

The economy of tomorrow is unlikely to look much like that of yesterday.

As the world undergoes a major transformation, it's the time of significant opportunity and also threat.

I am a child of my generation, and I rejoice that I live in such splendidly disturbing times.

The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to (by both) the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.

It is when empires begin to fall, that they tend to cause the most mayhem.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Competition—ruthless, unforgiving, to-the-death competition—is a crucial feature of capitalism.

Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.

Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.

In the capitalist society there is a place and bread for all. Its ability to expand provides sustenance for every worker. Permanent unemployment is not a feature of free capitalism.

For most of history, the prime source of human insecurity was nature. Capitalist societies have been oriented toward innovation and dynamism, to the creation of new knowledge, new products, and new modes of production and distribution. All this has shifted the locus of insecurity from nature to the economy.