John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
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.
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.
Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
The ideas by which people ... interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.
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
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.
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.
Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
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.
But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.
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.
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.
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.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
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.
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.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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.
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 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.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
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.
While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
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.