John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

266 Sourced Quotes

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

John Kenneth Galbraith
No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.

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

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
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
But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

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
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes — indeed, deletes — the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
"Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.

John Kenneth Galbraith
You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The superior confidence which people repose in the tall man is well merited. Being tall, he is more visible than other men and being more visible, he is much more closely watched. In consequence, his behavior is far better than that of smaller men.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.

John Kenneth Galbraith
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The hallmark of the conventional wisdom is acceptability. It has the approval of those to whom it is addressed.

John Kenneth Galbraith