John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

266 Sourced 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.

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

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

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
The traveler to the United States will do well, however, to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.

John Kenneth Galbraith
We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

John Kenneth Galbraith
Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Few things are more tempting to a writer than to repeat, admiringly, what he has said before.

John Kenneth Galbraith
There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.

John Kenneth Galbraith
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

John Kenneth Galbraith
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

John Kenneth Galbraith
A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.

John Kenneth Galbraith
That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The Third Way is a purely political concept. The increase in numbers and power of the middle-income groups means that governments choose to meet their needs first. The Third Way is a justification of that necessity.

John Kenneth Galbraith
I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.

John Kenneth Galbraith