Top 100 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

#1. F or a decade after the bursting of the debt bubble in 1837, business conditions were depressed in the United States. The number of banks available for financing speculative adventures declined. Then, after another 10 years, public memory faded again.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #71812
#2. That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #83244
#3. One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #86833
#4. In economics, the majority is always wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #103049
#5. No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #121223
#6. Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #127514
#7. According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #150006
#8. I can measure the motions of bodies," Sir Isaac Newton once observed, "but I cannot measure human folly." Nor could he do so as regards his own. He was to lose

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #191738
#9. To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #206056
#10. It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #210019
#11. There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #221987
#12. I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #232925
#13. It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #240794
#14. The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #296882
#15. One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #300614
#16. The spirit should never grow old.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #311207
#17. Power is as power does.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #313986
#18. There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #318197
#19. Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #330687
#20. Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #331906
#21. Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #346662
#22. A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #361300
#23. The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #368829
#24. It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #439742
#25. Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #445888
#26. One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #515998
#27. The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #516149
#28. Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #527623
#29. Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #544433
#30. Galbraith's First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #586954
#31. The rule will often be here reiterated: financial genius is before the fall. I

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #712108
#32. It is in the long run that the corporation lives.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #715504
#33. Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #718669
#34. If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #735418
#35. Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #749871
#36. We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #773093
#37. However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #789986
#38. Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #792683
#39. It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #805172
#40. Economics is not an exact science.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #813932
#41. Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #825528
#42. This was because of a special American commitment to the seeming magic of money creation and its presumptively wondrous economic effects. T

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #829252
#43. If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #849506
#44. In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #888128
#45. This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #908592
#46. The family which takes it mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #919136
#47. It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #968021
#48. No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #975258
#49. The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #999495
#50. If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1019182
#51. More die in the United States of too much food than of too little

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1031857
#52. Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1064249
#53. The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1064678
#54. Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1085986
#55. The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1091353
#56. It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1099123
#57. Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1103010
#58. My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1120877
#59. Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1122836
#60. Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1147551
#61. It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1180183
#62. It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1232724
#63. It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1249502
#64. What is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1262237
#65. Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1272568
#66. Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1290598
#67. The consequences of successful action seemed almost as terrible as the consequences of inaction, and they could be more horrible for those who took the action. A bubble can easily be punctured. But to incise it with a needle so that it subsides gradually is a task of no small delicacy.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1303157
#68. Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1306044
#69. THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1328927
#70. Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1351261
#71. A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1352927
#72. War remains the decisive human failure.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1353708
#73. Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1383192
#74. Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1401746
#75. Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1426779
#76. It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1427002
#77. The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1432355
#78. I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1434035
#79. Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1444791
#80. The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1445265
#81. There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1467405
#82. The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1471371
#83. In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1487214
#84. The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1506784
#85. In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1529619
#86. All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1564088
#87. It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1618302
#88. There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1624310
#89. The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1637565
#90. SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1669896
#91. In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1693971
#92. In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1701006
#93. Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1784888
#94. At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1785187
#95. The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1794183
#96. There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1796849
#97. In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1804717
#98. If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1814480
#99. One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1843567
#100. There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know.

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes #1874734

Famous Authors

Popular Topics