John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.
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All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
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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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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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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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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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Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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Economics is not an exact science.
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THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
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Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
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If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
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THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.
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Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.
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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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Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
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There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.
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By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
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Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
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All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.
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It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position, and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began.