John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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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.
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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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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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War remains the decisive human failure.
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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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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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If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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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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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.
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Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
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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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By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
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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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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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Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
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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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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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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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One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find.
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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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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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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.