Robert Heilbroner Quotes

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification—denying real class differences wherever possible.

We use language that has been designed to keep order, and to keep people in line.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.

Do you believe that the German middle class, this flower of the intelligentsia, would refuse to serve us and put their minds at our disposal?... We will do what we like with the German middle class.

Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

Freedom breeds inequality.

Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap.

The privileged elites are part of the globalization moment that we live in.

It is a dark, unspoken truth that the powerful - the 'ruling class' - make up the rules as they go along.

It's much easier to gain control over a mass population when you pit them against each other.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

There's this idea of America that some people have to win and some have to lose, so certain things are in place to make this happen. Some people have to be the next legislators and political elites, and some have to fill the prisons and work in McDonald's. That's how America works. It's a machine which needs people up top and people down low.