John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
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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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Power is as power does.
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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.
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There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
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We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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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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Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
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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.
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Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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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 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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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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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.
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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.
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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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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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.
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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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The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
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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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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.
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In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.