John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
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The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
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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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There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
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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 wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
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The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
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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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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
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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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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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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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Power is as power does.
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Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.
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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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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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While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
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He enlarged perceptibly the scope for debate, liberalized appreciably the intellectual and cultural life of the country and proclaimed the obvious truth that, after an atomic exchange, little would distinguish the Communist ashes from the capitalist ashes.
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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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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.