Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.

Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.

Corporations did not achieve the scale we normally associate with them until the 1880s; but it's still hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln would offered much in the way of determined opposition. William Herndon said that they always thanked the Lord when a corporation came knocking at their office door to hire them.

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

Marxist revolutions generally happened in countries that otherwise could not have carried out an industrial revolution.

The main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial life.

One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over.

We often say that the M&M Group's destiny is inextricably linked with India's. Both were born around the same time: India in 1947, M&M in 1945. The group has experienced the same vicissitudes that the Indian economy has.

This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

Ours is a capitalist society. It is therefore inevitable that, in part- and I repeat- in part- we must address this goal of deracialisation within the context of the property relations characteristics of a capitalist economy.

America can no more survive and grow without big business than it can survive and grow without small business.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

Business is one of the most powerful forces for change on the planet.

Without a consumer society there was no need for an industrial revolution.

The merchant created the industrialist.

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.