John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

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.

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.

The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products. On no other activity, religious, political or moral, is he so elaborately, skillfully and expensively instructed.

For thousands of reluctant scholars, a few distantly remembered curves depicting the interaction of supply and demand to establish prices have for long been the only permanent return on an investment in economic education.

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.

It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known.

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

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

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich.

It is a well-established, though perhaps somewhat transparent, technique of argument, on encountering something which cannot easily be reconciled with preferred belief, to point to the exceptions. What does not invariably exist is then held not to exit.

Men of genius do not destroy themselves along with so many others and invite such a dismal end.

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.

THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.

Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn't enough and needs more.

There is nothing in economic life so willfully misunderstood as the great speculative episode. T