Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

Too often we shape our public positions on the basis of our economic connections. That brings us dangerously close to economic determinism.

I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.

Conscious choice is creative. Unconscious choice is destructive. That is how we end up living other people's lives.

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.

I think you can learn to have much more pleasant thoughts moving through your mind that will help ease any situation, and it takes making a conscious choice to do so.

Everybody is influenced by someone.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Sadly, if we are not confident about our choices, we can easily let other peoples' comments make us feel guilty and ruin the joy we need to experience in life through doing the little things that mean a lot to us.

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, "Oh, okay, so it's just one choice." One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda.

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.

From the time I was little, I'd been kind of freaked out by the whole deal with large groups of people. And even moderate - sized groups of people. It's always made me very uncomfortable. It's such a strange phenomenon, what happens to people when they're all moving in the same direction, all chanting the same tune, the same line of slogans or something. That stuff always seems very alien and bizarre to me, and kind of scary.

I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.

Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Many people help construct our attitudes at a certain time and place.

You can't let anybody else tell you what your choices are. Sometimes they won't give you the right choice.

Fear keeps us rooted in the past. Fear of the unknown, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of the future-all these fears and more keep us trapped, repeating the same old patterns and making the same choices over and over again. Fear prevents us from moving outside the comfort-or even the familiar discomfort-of what we know. It's nearly impossible to achieve our highest vision for our lives as long as we are being guided by our fears.

I wish I could manage to be glad! Only I never can remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad whenever you like!

I don't get a lot of choices in movies. It's not like I'm Brad Pitt and I can walk in and go here's the film I want to do and everyone runs around... I don't have that. I stand in line and do auditions. I'm there with 80 other guys trying to be that guy. Every once in awhile I luck out.

If you knew that miracles could happen, what miracles would you wish for? If you knew that you could have it all and do anything you wanted, what would you choose to have and what would you choose to do?