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
#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
#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
#5. No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#10. It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#12. I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#25. Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#27. The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#34. If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#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
#41. Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#47. It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#48. No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#55. The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#57. Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#58. My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#70. Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#78. I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#87. It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#94. At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#95. The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
#98. If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#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
#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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics