John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
-
Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
-
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 Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
-
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
-
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.
-
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.
-
We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.
-
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.
-
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
-
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.
-
When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble - until the day of disaster.
-
In numerous years following the war the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not pay off it's debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.
-
Power is as power does.
-
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.