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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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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'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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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
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The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.
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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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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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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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A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
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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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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
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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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One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
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Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
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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 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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You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
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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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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.