John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
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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.
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Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
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But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
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If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.
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Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.
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The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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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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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.
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In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.
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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.
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It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.
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We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.
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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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There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
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Power is as power does.
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In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
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Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
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There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
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We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?