Top 50 Joseph A. Schumpeter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

2. “Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

3. “Profit is the payment you get when you take advantage of change.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

4. “Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

5. “We always plan too much and always think too little.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

6. “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

7. “Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

8. “Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

9. “Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

10. “Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

11. “We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

12. “There exists no more democratic institution than the market.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

13. “In economic life competition is never completely lacking, but hardly ever is it perfect.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

14. “Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

15. “Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

16. “The modern mind dislikes gold because it blurts out unpleasant truths.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

17. “I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

18. “The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare – all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

19. “Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

20. “Gentlemen, a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

21. “Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

22. “It is, after all, only common sense to realize that, but for the fact that economic life is a process of incessant internal change, the business cycle, as we know it, would not exist.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

23. “The ballot is stronger than bullets.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

24. “I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people’s lives.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

25. “History is a record of “effects” the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

26. “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

27. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

28. “The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

29. “Capitalism Survive? – I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

30. “Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

31. “Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

32. “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

33. “Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

34. “It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense...”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

35. “The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily – and perhaps most tellingly – described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

36. “This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

37. “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

38. “Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political – legislative and administrative – decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

39. “The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

40. “Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

41. “We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against the caricatures we make of them.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

42. “Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

43. “The metal of economic theory is in Marx’s pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

44. “Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

45. “The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

46. “Want and effective demand are not the same thing. If they were, the poorest nations would be the ones to display the most vigorous demand.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

47. “The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

48. “Nothing is so retentive as a nation’s memory.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

49. “Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

50. “To the believer Marxism presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions...”

— Joseph A. Schumpeter