John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
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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.
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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.
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Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
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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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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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Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
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Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
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The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
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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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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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All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
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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.
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A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
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In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
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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.
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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.
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If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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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.
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War remains the decisive human failure.
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Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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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.