Home > Author > Robert L. Heilbroner
1 " If socialism failed, it was for political, more than economic, reasons; and if capitalism is to succeed it will be because it finds the political will and means to tame its economic forces. "
― Robert L. Heilbroner , The Worldly Philosophers
2 " As long as custom and command ruled the world, the problem of riches and poverty hardly struck the earlier philosophers at all, other than to be accepted with a sigh or railed at as another sign of man's inner worthlessness. "
3 " You cannot get them to talk of politics so long as they are well employed, "
4 " To make the Society Happy... , it is requisite that great numbers should be Ignorant as well as Poor,” wrote Bernard Mandeville, the shrewdest and wickedest social commentator of the early eighteenth century. "
5 " Nevertheless these first readings will give us a chance to think about a matter that we would certainly consider to be at the heart of economics—the drive to gain wealth. "
― Robert L. Heilbroner , Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy
6 " Communists talked to the masses and urged violence, if necessary, to encompass their ends; the Socialists appealed to their own kind—to the intelligentsia, the petit bourgeois, the freethinking middle-class citizen, or the intellectually emancipated aristocrat—for adherents to their schemes. "
7 " As the citizens of the former Soviet Union are discovering to their consternation, a market system means the end of the long lines for bread that were a curse of life in a society of centralized command, but it also means the introduction of a line that did not exist formerly—namely, standing in line at employment offices, looking for work. "
― Robert L. Heilbroner , 21st Century Capitalism
8 " (6:10) [T]he love of money is the root of all evil…. "
9 " phalanstère. "
10 " Weird and fantastic as it seems, the Fourierist idea took some hold, even in that fortress of practicality and common sense, the United States. At one time there were over forty phalansteries in this country, and if one groups together the Owenite communities and the religious movements of various sorts, there were at least one hundred and seventy-eight actual Utopian groups with from fifteen to nine hundred members each. "
11 " It is that wealth is inextricably associated with inequality. This is an insight that we get from a most unlikely source, the first of the great philosophers of capitalism, who wrote that “wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. . . . The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many.” It is Adam Smith speaking, not Karl Marx.11 "
12 " A student incquired at his college bookstore about a book whose author's name he could not remember, but whose queer title was, to the best of his recollection, "A World Full of Lobsters. "
