Top 100 Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
#1. All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
George Stigler
#2. This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.
Steven D. Levitt
#3. John Kenneth Galbraith said: Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#4. John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Anthony Burgess
#5. It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#8. In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand; the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#9. Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#10. Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#11. There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#12. Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#13. 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
#15. Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#16. Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#17. 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
#18. If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
John Kenneth Galbraith
#19. 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
#20. Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#21. The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#22. The process by which wants are now synthesized is a potential source of economic instability. Production and therewith employment and social security are dependent on an inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation. This may one day falter.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#25. No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#29. 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
#30. But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#31. have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#32. All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#33. 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
#34. Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#35. Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#37. A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#40. It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#41. Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#43. I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#44. No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#45. People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#46. 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
#47. By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#48. Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#49. But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#50. In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#51. There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#52. 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
#53. In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#54. 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
#58. Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#59. Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#60. 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
#61. The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#62. The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence to them.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#63. 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
#64. 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
#66. In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#67. 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
#68. In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#69. 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
#70. Increasing values again brought increasing values. As with the canals and turnpikes, it was transportation, this time the railroads, that was the focus of the speculation. Here the horizons seemed truly without limit. Who could lose on what was so obviously needed?
John Kenneth Galbraith
#71. 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
#72. In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#73. The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#74. What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#75. No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#77. All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#78. The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#79. I feel very angry when I think of brilliant, or even interesting, women whose minds are wasted on a home. Better have an affair. It isn't permanent and you keep your job.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#80. Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#81. I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#82. 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
#83. Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#84. In public administration good sense would seem to require the public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize the eventual disappointment.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#85. When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder ...
John Kenneth Galbraith
#86. All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#87. The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need ... But could anything seriously be done about it?
John Kenneth Galbraith
#88. The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#90. dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#91. If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#94. The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#96. The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#98. The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#100. 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
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