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John Kenneth Galbraith
218 quotes
“In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The American Economy: Its Substance and Myth," quoted in Years of the Modern (1949), edited by J.W. Chase
“You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech of Adlai Stevenson, Los Angeles (1956), written by Galbraith
“Also present, as a kind of co-host, was the rector of the state university. He asked me if I knew the difference between capitalism and socialism. In capitalism man exploits man. In socialism it is just the reverse.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia, May 8–30, 1958" p. 28
“There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New York Times Magazine (9 October 1960)
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to John F. Kennedy (2 March 1962), printed in Galbraith's Ambassador's Journal (1969)
“In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword to The Beach Book by Gloria Steinem (1963); reprinted in Galbraith's A View from the Stands (1986)
“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.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Made to Last (1964), ch. 4
“The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society....I am led to the conclusion that we are the servants in thought, as in action, of the machines we have created to serve us.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In 1967, quoted in O. W. Markley and Willis W. Harman (eds.) Changing Images of Man (Pergamon Press, 1982) ch. 3, p. 45
“Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ambassador's Journal (1969)
“You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in conversation with Charles Frankel, High on Foggy Bottom: an outsider's inside view of the Government (1969), p. 11
“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New York Times Magazine (7 June 1970)
“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.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economics, Peace and Laughter (1971), p. 50
“Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), BBC Television series (also published in book form, non verbatim version)
“Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: H.L. Mencken," The Washington Post (14 September 1980); reprinted in A View from the Stands (1986)
“Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: on Friedman's advising of the Israeli government, "The Private Man and the Public Life; Interview With Galbraith", The Washington Post (26 April 1981)
“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.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recession Economics," New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 1 (4 February 1982)
“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1982), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 972
“Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man... begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Corporate Man," The New York Times (22 January 1984)
“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.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Convenient Reverse of Logic in Our Time," commencement address, American University (1984); reprinted in A View from the Stands (1986)
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (28 July 1989)
“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (28 July 1989)
“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (28 July 1989)
“In the first place I identify this ["the equilibrium of poverty"] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with John Newark (1990) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004), ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield
“One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with John Newark (1990) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004), ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield
“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (20 November 1991)
“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A History of Economics (1991), ch. 21
“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)
“There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)
“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.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)
“It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Journey Through Economic Time (1994)
“Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Lorie Conway (1997) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004) ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield. Conway saw these words on a framed needlepoint, entitled "Galbraith's Firs…
“When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble — until the day of disaster.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Galbraith on crashes, Japan and Walking Sticks" by Ben Laurance and William Keegan, in The Observer (21 June 1998)
“Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes — indeed, deletes — the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Free Market Fraud", The Progressive (January 1999)
“Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1991), by John Toland, also quoted in "Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II (1995) by Jacob G. Hornberger
“The modern conservative is, in fact, not especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a speech he made to the Senate on 18 December 1963 that was entered into the Congressional Record (p. 25042). The speech was adapted into an article for the March 1964 issue of Harper's magazine, "Let Us Begin: An …
“The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Article in The Saturday Evening Post, 1968
“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?”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the most unpredictable in their consequences.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less — and probably was much less — than a million.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source