John Kenneth Galbraith quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith on Wise Famous Quotes.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.

Much of the world's work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

The rule will often be here reiterated: financial genius is before the fall. I

The ideas by which people ... interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.

Happiness does not require an expanding economy

Men of conservative temperament have long suspected that one thing leads to another.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

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

Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.

Power is as power does.

The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.

In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.

Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

Conscience is better served by a myth.

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.

Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.

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.

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder ...

But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.

It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.

Foresight is an imperfect thing - all prevision in economics is imperfect.

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.

War remains the decisive human failure.

Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

Agriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

It is the good fortune of the affluent country that the opportunity cost of economic discussion is low and hence it can afford all kinds.

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.

Genius is a rising stock market.

No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.

The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

Some things were never meant to be recycled.

I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.

Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.

Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.

But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.

A wrong decision isn't forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

With the American failure came world failure.

Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?

Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding