John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
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Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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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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But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
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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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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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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.
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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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The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.
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No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
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Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.
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Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
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A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
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There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
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It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
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Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
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Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
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Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?