John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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

Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.

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

Some things were never meant to be recycled.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.

One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.

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.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

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.

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

The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.

She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done.

Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.

It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.

Genius is a rising stock market.

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

More investment trusts securities were offered in September of 1929 even than in August - the total was above $600 million. However, the nearly simultaneous promotion of Shenandoah and Blue Ridge was to stand as the pinnacle of new era finance. It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.

Those 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.

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

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.

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

The notion that you would initiate a new product without preparing the way by persuasion and advertising and salesmanship is fantastic. It's an integral part of the system.

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

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

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.

In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.

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

In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

The spirit should never grow old.

There 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.

I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.

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

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.