John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
-
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
-
The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring.
-
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.
-
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-
Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
-
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.
-
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-
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.
-
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
-
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.
-
There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
-
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.
-
The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
-
Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
-
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.