John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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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 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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It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
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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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In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
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Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
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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 greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
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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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The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
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Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.
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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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Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
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Power is as power does.
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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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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.
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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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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.