John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
-
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.
-
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
-
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.
-
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
-
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
-
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
-
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.
-
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
-
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.
-
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
-
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.
-
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,