John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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The pioneering instrument of reform was the Bank of England. Of all institutions concerned with economics none has for so long enjoyed such prestige. It is, in all respects, to money as St. Peter's is to Faith.
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There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
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Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
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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.
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Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
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Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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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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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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Power is as power does.
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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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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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Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
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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.
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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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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.
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While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
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No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
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I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.