John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization - the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.

The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need...But could anything seriously be done about it?

The oldest [John Kenneth] Galbraith rule is that when you hear that a new era has dawned, you should take cover.

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.

I begin with the renaming of the system. It used to be capitalism. But that evokes [Karl] Marx and [John] Rockefeller. So now we speak of the market system. That is a nice bland expression, which forgets those off-color references.

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.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.

Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.

In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.

A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.

I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.

If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.

Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.

The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

What is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.

Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.

No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent

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.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

Men will look back in amusement at the pretence that once caused people to refer to General Dynamics and North American Aviation and AT&T as private business.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder.