Karl Compton Quotes

The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.

In a few hundred years you have achieved in America what it took thousands of years to achieve in Europe.

Free men engaged in free enterprise build better nations, but free enterprise is not a hunting license.

I've been dedicated to the proposition that there's been no greater wealth-creation system in the history of mankind than the American free-enterprise system.

I had the good fortune to be raised in the 1940s and the 1950s. As I entered business in the late 1950s and 1960s, America was just coming into its own as a great industrial power. It allowed young entrepreneurs to start their engines, to start their businesses, to borrow a little money and to leverage what they had.

The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

Don't let's lose sight of what creates wealth. It is open markets, it is capitalism.

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

The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?

Many pioneers of these industrial changes, it is true, became rich. But they acquired their wealth by supplying the public with motor cars, airplanes, radio sets, refrigerators, moving and talking pictures, and variety of less spectacular but no less useful innovations. These new products were certainly not an achievement of offices and bureaucrats.

If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

We stand for the maintenance of private property... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.

We need a leader who understands the moral case for free enterprise.

When I was trying to figure out why lives have improved so much in the last 300 years, where we've gone from a third of kids dying before 5 to - by 1990 it was down to 10% - now it's down to 5%. And saying why, over all history, there were smart people, but that number didn't change. Average life span didn't change. What's magical about what's been deemed the Industrial Revolution? It's really energy intensity.

The more one observes, the more clearly does he see that it is in the soil of pure science that are found the origins of all our modern industry and commerce. In fact,our civilization is wholly built upon our scientific discoveries.

Free enterprise system was born the second year the pilgrims were here. And of course, it has made America the most prosperous country in the world.

Why is our free-enterprise system so strong?- Not because it stands still, frozen in the past, but because it has always adapted to changing realities

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

One could imagine a period like Japan13 years ago, however, in which indexing over time wouldn't work.

Entrepreneurs embody the promise of America: the idea that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard and see it through, you can succeed in this country. And in fulfilling this promise, entrepreneurs also play a critical role in expanding our economy and creating jobs.

I'm not asking for more entitlement programs; I'm asking for more enterprise.

To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society.