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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 " 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. "
6 " phalanstère. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "