John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class.
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More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
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The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.
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The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
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And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.
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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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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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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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The Coolidge Bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.
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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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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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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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Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.
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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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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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The overall effect of the rise of the industrial system is greatly to reduce the union as a social force. But it will not disappear or become entirely unimportant.
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
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The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.
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One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
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In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.
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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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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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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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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.