John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
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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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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.
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One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
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More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
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Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age - after a matter of ten or fifteen years - they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
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In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
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The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
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In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which.
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
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Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
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Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
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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.
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'Poverty' Pitt exclaimed 'is no disgrace but it is damned annoying.' In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.
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I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
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The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
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Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.
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But there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong.
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The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.
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The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being,
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Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.
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A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
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But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
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Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.