-
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
-
Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
John Kenneth Galbraith
-
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
-
The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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,
John Kenneth Galbraith -
American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
John Kenneth Galbraith
-
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
John Kenneth Galbraith -
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith