John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
-
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.
-
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
-
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-
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.
-
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-
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.
-
The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.
-
Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.
-
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.
-
The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring.
-
There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
-
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
-
While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
-
The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
-
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
-
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.
-
Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.
-
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.
-
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
-
However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.
-
Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.
-
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.
-
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
-
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.