There is an enormous thrust in our time to have a simple answer. And that simple answer is that all depends on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. And Alan, who is an old acquaintance of mine, is a marvelous performer in the impression he gives of enormously great perception.
John Kenneth GalbraithIt was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
John Kenneth GalbraithEven in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them.
John Kenneth GalbraithThis is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
John Kenneth GalbraithThose days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.
John Kenneth GalbraithWhen you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.
John Kenneth GalbraithThere can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
John Kenneth Galbraith