# Quote — Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

> The book was called Imperialism; it was a devastating volume. For here was the most important and searing criticism which had ever been levied against the profit system. The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world. He saw the process of imperialism as a relentless and restless tendency of capitalism to rescue itself from a self-imposed dilemma, a tendency that necessarily involved foreign commercial conquest and that thereby inescapably involved a constant risk of war. No more profound moral indictment of capitalism had ever been posed.

- Author: [Robert Heilbroner](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-heilbroner.md)
- Book: [The Worldly Philosophers](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-heilbroner/the-worldly-philosophers.md)
- Page: 188
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Heilbroner#The_Worldly_Philosophers_(1953)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-heilbroner/the-worldly-philosophers/the-book-was

## More from this book

> But while Ricardo, the economist, walked like a god (although he was a modest and retiring person), Malthus was relegated to a lower status.

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-heilbroner/the-worldly-philosophers/but-while-ricardo.md)

> If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

p. 269 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-heilbroner/the-worldly-philosophers/if-an-economy.md)

> Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits.

p. 224 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-heilbroner/the-worldly-philosophers/very-few-of-the.md)