Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

It’s hard to be a fan of the free market these days when the free market has just driven the economy over the cliff.

From time to time, capitalism has a tendency to implode.

When Americans—or citizens of any country—are faced with significant economic forces beyond their control, they struggle for answers, and often act out of frustration. The result is more turbulent politics, more strident cultural nationalism, and violence, as people seek ways to improve their economic situation … when the pie is shrinking.

Incendiary capitalism is carrying its out evil works more dangerously than ever, and is doing so in the increasingly dangerous neighborhood of the powder kegs that are the great European military powers.

If America is a ship, it looks a lot like it's sinking - financially, morally, spiritually. It's frightening.

I think when the bottom started to drop out, we didn't recognize it.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

Commercial distress in any great business center will the more surely create widespread disaster.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

I think that the economy, and the political system, has literally become such a disaster I don't know if it's possible to save it.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

… capitalism is being killed by its achievements.

History indicates that that at a certain point of economic breakdown people cease being concerned with liberties and are ready to accept regimentation. The danger is obviously greater when two main values so many people have are personal peace and affluence.

In times of industrial depression, or great increase in the cost of living, whether brought about by war or by the ebb and flow of world prosperity, these populations, oppressed with misery, turn to political remedies for matters that are beyond human control.

Under stable and incremental conditions, a free-market economy spurs entrepreneurship, ensures efficiency, and generates wealth. Those conditions no longer apply.

A serious dose of unemployment and a spate of bank failures can make the unelectable electable quite quickly.

I have for four years now been ringing the bell. Economic Holocaust is coming. Economic day of reckoning is coming.

At a time when our country is waging two wars, approval ratings for Congress are at historic lows, unemployment is at a 70-year high and financial institutions have collapsed around us, I can't imagine anyone seriously opposing a National Day of Prayer.

The path that we are headed on economically in America is one that leads to total ruination of the American system.

The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.