John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
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Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
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Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
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Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.
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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.
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Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.
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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.
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It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.
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If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
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A constant in the history of money is that every remedy is reliably a source of new abuse.
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Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
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All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
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Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
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Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.
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The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.
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To the man who held stock on margin, disaster had only one face and that was falling prices. But now prices were to be allowed to fall. The speculator's only comfort, henceforth, was that his ruin would be accomplished in an orderly and becoming manner.
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Our political life favors the extremes of speech; the man who is gifted in the arts of abuse is bound to be a notable, if not always a great figure.
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American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.
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The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
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In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was 'with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful.' The press was busy printing money.
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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.
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In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
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The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.