Robert Heilbroner Quotes

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

American capitalism has helped finance the communist takeover of the world. Somebody is going to answer to God for this

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

All systems of political administration or governmental machinery are but the reflex of the economic forms which underlie them

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.

Middle class prosperity—economics—depended on middle class power—politics.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

I think the other side of this is that while the contradictions matter, one of the things that you cannot lose sight of is that even with a guy like [George] Soros the thing that he doesn't question, which does unify that class, is that they don't want to get rid of the capitalist system, they don't see an alternative.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Democracy, taken in its narrower, purely political, sense, suffers from the fact that those in economic and political power possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests. The democratic form of government in itself does not automatically solve problems; it offers, however, a useful framework for their solution. Everything depends ultimately on the political and moral qualities of the citizenry.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Class is material consumed.

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.