Galbraith Quotes & Sayings

From the fact of general well-being came the new position of the poor. They were now in most communities a minority. The voice of the people was now the voice of relative affluence. Politicians in pursuit of votes could be expected to have a diminishing concern for the very poor. Compassion would have to serve instead - an uncertain substitute. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I'm totally serious. Look it up on the net. When women turn, they really turn. — Robert Galbraith

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. — John Kenneth Galbraith

A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door; men who ogled your breasts under the pretense of scanning the wine shelves; men for whom your mere physical presence constituted a lubricious invitation. Her — Robert Galbraith

The model? Whoa.' But Spanner's interest in human beings, even when dead or famous, was still secondary to his fondness for rare comics, technological innovation, and bands of which Strike had never heard. — Robert Galbraith

Men looked so tragic when they cried. — Robert Galbraith

biscuits, he checked his mobile. There — Robert Galbraith

In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance. — Robert Galbraith

That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Do whatever you want with this dedication, but don't - don't - use it on your eyebrows. — Robert Galbraith

The women fell silent with the instinctive courtesy women often show to incapacitated males. — Robert Galbraith

At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean. — 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

Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants. — John Kenneth Galbraith

But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The spirit should never grow old. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel. — Robert Galbraith

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

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

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. — Anthony Burgess

Being sworn at by random people was the price you paid for living in London, — Robert Galbraith

So when people ask Galbraith, why is the change in marijuana laws important to the people of this country, because it returns to the people the right to plant a seed in God's earth and consume the green natural plant that comes up out of it. — Gatewood Galbraith

There were several pictures of Lula with Evan Duffield, a few of them clearly taken by one or other of the pair themselves, holding the camera at arm's length, both of them apparently stoned or drunk. — Robert 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

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

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Birthdays in Lucy's world were always celebrated, never forgotten: there must be cake and candles and cards and presents; time must be marked, order preserved, traditions upheld. — Robert 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

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Strike felt abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among capuchin monkeys. — Robert Galbraith

This house had a small front garden, black railings and a lawn in need of mowing. Two white front doors had been crammed together side by side, showing that the three-story building had been converted into upper and lower flats. A girl called Robin Ellacott lived on the ground floor. Though he had made it his business to find out her real name, inside his own head he called her The Secretary. He had just seen her pass in front of the bow window, easily recognizable because of her bright hair. — Robert Galbraith

Can I ask who you are, sir?"
"Yeah, I expect so," said Strike, walking past him and ringing the doorbell. Anstis's dinner invitation notwithstanding, he was not feeling sympathetic to the police just now. "Should be just about within your capabilities. — Robert Galbraith

Like foxes to a dustbin, — Robert Galbraith

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

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

In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole. — John Kenneth Galbraith

More pre-Christmas revelers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging. — Robert Galbraith

In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down. — John Kenneth Galbraith

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls. — John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Psychology's loss," said Strike, "is private detection's gain. — Robert Galbraith

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people. — John Kenneth Galbraith

He had almost fallen asleep on top of Elin last night, and counted it among the week's few small achievements that he had finished the job, at least. — Robert Galbraith

In days and he was too late to pick up the trail at her home station. The best he could do was to lurk around the — Robert Galbraith

Robin did not know why the announcement that Strike was off to meet Elin should lower her spirits. — Robert Galbraith

Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Strike would have advised any friend to leave and not look back, but he had come to see her like a virus in his blood that he doubted he would ever eradicate; the best he could hope for was to control its symptoms. — Robert Galbraith

However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth. — Robert Galbraith

Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards. — John Kenneth Galbraith

If I was going to lie to you, I'd already be elected. — Gatewood Galbraith

She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste. — Robert Galbraith

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. — Robert Galbraith

You know, there's pride, and then there's stupidity — Robert Galbraith

We need readers," muttered Daniel Chard. "More readers. Fewer writers. — Robert Galbraith

Some time ago Ken Galbraith, in his witty and insightful The Great Crash, coined a new economic term: "the bezzle," defined as the current amount of undiscovered embezzlement. This financial creature has a magical quality: The embezzlers are richer by the amount of the bezzle, while the embezzlees do not yet feel poorer. — Warren Buffett

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

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences. — John Kenneth Galbraith

You are not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you. — Robert Galbraith

Keeping busy was the only answer: action had always been his drug of choice. — Robert 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

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. — 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

Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Lucky is he who has been able to understand the causes of things Virgil, Georgics, Book 2 — Robert Galbraith

in literature. Neither of them minded women — Robert Galbraith

Hesitation was fatal. Choose. — Robert 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

There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Charlotte, submitting to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends' girlfriends and wives. To this he preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag. — Robert Galbraith

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

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work. — John Kenneth Galbraith

salacious gossip. The fact that — Robert Galbraith

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof. — John Kenneth Galbraith

middle-aged woman trying to reach the — Robert Galbraith

The process by which wants are now synthesized is a potential source of economic instability. Production and therewith employment and social security are dependent on an inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation. This may one day falter. — John Kenneth Galbraith

His size, to which was added the offense of a backpack, caused unexpressed disgruntlement in those commuters forced to share the space with him, but Strike barely noticed. — Robert Galbraith

Bestigui, who was five feet six inches at the most, had pushed his way out from behind his desk now; as unafraid of the enormous Strike as a pit bull whose yard has been invaded by a Rottweiler. — Robert Galbraith

Strike, meanwhile, had seen just enough of Robin to be shocked by her appearance. He had never seen her face so pale, nor her eyes so puffy and bloodshot. Even as he sat down at his desk, eager to hear what information on Whittaker Shanker had brought to his office, the thought crossed his mind: What's the bastard done to her? And for a fraction of a second, before fixing all his attention on Shanker, Strike imagined punching Matthew and enjoying it. — Robert Galbraith

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce. — John Kenneth Galbraith

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. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Don't turn your back, don't show your profile, You'll never know when it's your turn to go. — Robert Galbraith