John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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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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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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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.
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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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Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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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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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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Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
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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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No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.
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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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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?
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There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
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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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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
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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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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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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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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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One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find.