John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

266 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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The leisure class has been replaced by another and much larger class to which work has none of the older connotation of pain, fatigue, or other mental or physical discomfort. We have failed to observe the emergence of this New Class, as it may be simply called.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economics.

John Kenneth Galbraith
If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.

John Kenneth Galbraith
A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence. The production reflects the low marginal utility of the goods to society. The income reflects the high total utility of a livelihood to a person.

John Kenneth Galbraith
There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.

John Kenneth Galbraith
I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

John Kenneth Galbraith
All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.

John Kenneth Galbraith
No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
It is a commonplace of modern technology that there is a high measure of certainty that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

John Kenneth Galbraith
According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.

John Kenneth Galbraith
It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Mistakes in our dealings with Mother Nature can now have much larger unintended consequences, because many of our new technologies confer upon us new power without automatically giving us new wisdom.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

John Kenneth Galbraith