John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes & Sayings
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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Galbraith's First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The ideas by which people ... interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Happiness does not require an expanding economy
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
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 and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
— Anthony Burgess
The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Leverage was magnificently available,
— John Kenneth Galbraith
If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
In the world of minor lunacy, the behavior of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
A wrong decision isn't forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
With the American failure came world failure.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
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
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding
— John Kenneth Galbraith
If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
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
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.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
— George Stigler
The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Wisdom ... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Milton Friedman's misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The spirit should never grow old.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Economics is not an exact science.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Only foolish people are completely secure.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Genius is a rising stock market.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.
— John Kenneth Galbraith