John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
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The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.
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To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend.
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Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences.
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Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
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Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
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When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
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There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
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In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
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To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.
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Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
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Foresight is an imperfect thing - all prevision in economics is imperfect.
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You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
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In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.
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The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.
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In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
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The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
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With the American failure came world failure.
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There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
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Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
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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.
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At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
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In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.