John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

266 Sourced Quotes

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Migration…is the oldest action against poverty. It selects those who most want help. It is good for the country to which they go; it helps break the equilibrium of poverty in the country from which they came.

John Kenneth Galbraith
It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
Our political tradition sets great store by the generalized symbol of evil. This is the wrongdoer whose wrongdoing will be taken by the public to be the secret propensity of a whole community or class.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Of Germany in World War Two:
They should have been hard to defeat. That they were defeated is conclusive testimony to the inherent inefficiencies of dictatorship, the inherent efficiencies of freedom

John Kenneth Galbraith
In numerous years following the war the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not pay off it's debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.

John Kenneth Galbraith
He enlarged perceptibly the scope for debate, liberalized appreciably the intellectual and cultural life of the country and proclaimed the obvious truth that, after an atomic exchange, little would distinguish the Communist ashes from the capitalist ashes.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The pioneering instrument of reform was the Bank of England. Of all institutions concerned with economics none has for so long enjoyed such prestige. It is, in all respects, to money as St. Peter's is to Faith.

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

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.

John Kenneth Galbraith
I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge — that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

John Kenneth Galbraith
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Of all the races on earth, the Indians have the most nearly inexhaustible appetite for oratory.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

John Kenneth Galbraith
What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.

John Kenneth Galbraith
THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.

John Kenneth Galbraith