Robert Heilbroner Quotes

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.

To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

I tell you, my fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.

Everybody must be removed [from public office] who has the mentality of the capitalist.

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

Those who are seeking miraculous remedies for the depression are mistaken. Either the present depression is a periodic depression with the economic system, in which case it will be overcome, or it represents a transition from one stage of civilization to another.

Revolution is a transfer of property from class to class.

In order for a president to be transformational, the old order has to fall as the orthodoxies that kept it in power exhaust themselves.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

Social revolutions are never simple.

When we talk about technology, often, we talk about the fact that it's going to be cool; it's going to do all these things for us. But at the same time, technology will deeply change our societies.

We can trust technology to effect change - that's a given.

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

Dating back at least as far as the Luddites of early 19th-century Britain, new technologies cause fear about the inevitable changes they bring.