John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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Power is as power does.
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We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.
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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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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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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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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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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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We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
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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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There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
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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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While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
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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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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.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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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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The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.
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Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
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A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
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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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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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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.