Robert Heilbroner

Quotes

1. Keynes disdained inside information — in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information — and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading.

   p. 248

2. 

   It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

   p. 240

3. 

   But 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 ones.

   p. 137

4. 

   He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter.

   p. 3

5. 

   In the periods of crisis, the bigger firms absorb the smaller ones, and when the industrial monsters eventually go down, the wreckage is far greater than when the little enterprises buckle.

   p. 152

6. 

   It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

   p. 317

7. 

   But despite the clarion words of the Manifesto, the demonic note was not a call for a revolution of communism; it was a cry born only of frustration and despair.

   p. 128

8. 

   Even today — in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman than most New Deal economists.

   p. 62

9. 

   David Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly to the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then kicked back down to the bottom.

   p. 71

10. 

    The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

    p. 123

11. 

    Nobody wanted this commercialization of life.

    p. 21

12. 

    The change began with John Stuart Mill and the Utopians. When Mill pointed out that economics had no ultimate solution to the problem of distribution, that society might do with the fruits of its toil as it saw fit, he introduced into the mechanical calculus of the market a conflicting calculus of moral judgment.

    p. 307