Robert Heilbroner Quotes

Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works.

Communists are frustrated capitalists.

Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ -- who I think was the first socialist -- only socialism can really create a genuine society.

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

Bear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.

The word "Capitalism" expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.

Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

I'm not a communist, of course. But I do think that everything is down to economics. Capitalism doesn't change.

SOCIALISM—You have two cows, you give one to your neighbor; COMMUNISM—You have two cows, the government takes them both and gives you the milk; FASCISM—You have two cows, the government takes both and sells you the milk NAZISM—You have two cows, the government takes both and shoots you; CAPITALISM—You have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull; TRADE UNIONISM—You have two cows, they take them from you, shoot one, milk the other and throw the milk away; MORAL: Don't have anything to do with cows. They only bring you trouble.

The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers.

Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Well socialism is exactly the reverse.

Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.

Capitalism works. In the end, socialism imploded on itself. Communism imploded on itself. Ultimately jihadism will implode on itself, if we stay in the fight and stay on offense because failed philosophies don't work, there's no future.

Capitalism, communism ... it's all garbage.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

I am a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.

Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.

For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Every time I say the word capitalism, everyone just assumes I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do. But Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth - tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end... you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too.

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.