John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

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

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

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

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.

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

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

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

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.

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

It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

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

War remains the decisive human failure.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon our standard of living are in the public sector.

For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.

Only foolish people are completely secure.

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

There was the Missile Crisis, but one can't attribute to the [J.F.] Kennedy years anything like the problems that [Franklin] Roosevelt stood over and surmounted.

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

The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence. The production reflects the low marginal utility of the goods to society. The income reflects the high total utility of a livelihood to a person.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover either for grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much-cherished aspect of academic freedom.

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.

People are the common denominator of progress. So no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development. But we are coming to realize that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.

The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).

It's great to be with William Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right.

I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.

If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

I talked about the consolidation of power in the hands of the corporate bureaucracy, as distinct from the stockholders. To this view, I still strongly adhere.

The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.

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

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

Monetary policy suffers from the unfortunate absence of any occult effect. It has long been clear that economic management...would be greatly facilitated if resort could occasionally be had to witchcraft.