John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes & Sayings

Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy. — John Kenneth Galbraith

A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory ... allows us to believe that the modern experience of ... debt ... is in any way a new phenomenon. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction. — John Kenneth Galbraith

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really - keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence. — John Kenneth Galbraith

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated. — John Kenneth Galbraith

have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Individuals were dangerously captured by belief in their own financial acumen and intelligence and conveyed this error to others. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women. — John Kenneth Galbraith

A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. — John Kenneth Galbraith

If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing in modern attitudes is believed more to signify exceptional intelligence than association with large pools of money. Only immediate experience with those so situated denies the myth. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It's great to be with William Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In the world of minor lunacy, the behavior of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience of the comfortable. There could be a disturbing feeling, however fleeting, of unease, even guilt. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. — John Kenneth Galbraith

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition ... — John Kenneth Galbraith

Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection of the state. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said. — John Kenneth Galbraith

World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes. — John Kenneth Galbraith

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Genius is a rising stock market. — John Kenneth Galbraith

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence to them. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it. — John Kenneth Galbraith

She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable? — John Kenneth Galbraith

It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars. — John Kenneth Galbraith

All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment. — John Kenneth Galbraith

No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In the chapters that follow, we will see, and repeatedly, how the investing public is fascinated and captured by the great financial mind. That fascination derives, in turn, from the scale of the financial operations and the feeling that, with so much money involved, the mental resources behind them cannot be less. Only — John Kenneth Galbraith

Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor. — John Kenneth Galbraith

If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It is in the long run that the corporation lives. — John Kenneth Galbraith

With the American failure came world failure. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so. — John Kenneth Galbraith

This was because of a special American commitment to the seeming magic of money creation and its presumptively wondrous economic effects. T — John Kenneth Galbraith

Conscience is better served by a myth. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In public administration good sense would seem to require the public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize the eventual disappointment. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I can measure the motions of bodies," Sir Isaac Newton once observed, "but I cannot measure human folly." Nor could he do so as regards his own. He was to lose — John Kenneth Galbraith

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture. — John Kenneth Galbraith

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The consequences of successful action seemed almost as terrible as the consequences of inaction, and they could be more horrible for those who took the action. A bubble can easily be punctured. But to incise it with a needle so that it subsides gradually is a task of no small delicacy. — John Kenneth Galbraith

If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Most of those who manage investment operations or who have sizable amounts of money to invest are, indeed, Republican in their politics. Naturally, perhaps inevitably, they believe in the politicians they support, the doctrines these profess, and the economic advantage flowing therefrom. It is especially easy for those seemingly so blessed to be persuaded of the new and approximately infinite opportunities for enrichment inherent in a Republican age under a Republican regime. So in 1929; so again before the crash in 1987. All so vulnerable and all so affected, whatever their politics, should be warned. T — John Kenneth Galbraith

I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage. — John Kenneth Galbraith

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The family which takes it mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked. — John Kenneth Galbraith