John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

If a man be subject to the authority of another, he can at least ask that it not be an occasion for glee.

Galbraith's First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

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.

In the modern economy, a slightly bizarre fact, production is now more necessary for the employment it provides than for the goods and services it supplies.

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.

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.

The family which takes its 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.

Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.

The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.

I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.

The monetary experiments of Pennsylvania and its neighbors were by no means an unconsidered reaction to circumstance. They were extensively debated and had the energetic support of Benjamin Franklin, the most intelligent political man in the colonies and an ardent exponent of paper money. In 1729 he published his A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of Paper Currency, a brief on behalf of paper currency... In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearance because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful." The press was busy printing money.

THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

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.

There is the possibility, even the likelihood, of self-approving and extravagantly error-prone behavior on the part of those closely associated with money.