Quotes from Robert Heilbroner

Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.

If one could divine the nature of the economic forces in the world, one could foretell the future.

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth.

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.

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it.

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.

Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.

We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place.

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.

History , as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort , dignity , and personal advance is only a myth , or worse, a bitter mockery.

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 .

Today and over the foreseeable future,traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover.