John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
-
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.
-
Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
-
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.
-
In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand; the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.
-
That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.
-
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
-
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.
-
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
-
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.
-
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
-
It is in the long run that the corporation lives.
-
Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others.
-
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
-
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
-
Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
-
The traveler to the United States will do well, however, to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
-
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
-
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.
-
Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
-
Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.
-
War remains the decisive human failure.