John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
-
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
-
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
-
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
-
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
-
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
-
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
-
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.
-
Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
-
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.
-
One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
-
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
-
But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
-
Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
-
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
-
Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others.
-
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
-
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
-
If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.
-
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
-
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.
-
SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.
-
Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
-
A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
-
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.