John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

266 Sourced Quotes

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
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 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?

John Kenneth Galbraith
There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.

John Kenneth Galbraith
If we are concerned about our great appetite for materials, it is plausible to decrease waste, to make better use of stocks available, and to develop substitutes. But what about the appetite itself? The major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialised countries

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection of the state.

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

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
The enemy of the market is not ideology but the engineer.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

John Kenneth Galbraith
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

John Kenneth Galbraith