John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

"Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

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.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousandshares ofGeneral Motors or General Electric.

A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.

The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?

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.

Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

In fact, the Federal Reserve was helpless only because it wanted to be. Had it been determined to do something, it could for example have asked Congress for authority to halt trading on margin by granting the Board the power to set margin requirements. Margins were not low in 1929; a residue of caution had caused most brokers to require customers to put up in cash 45 to 50 per cent of the value of the stocks they were buying. However, this was all the cash numerous of their customers had.

One of the small but rewarding vocations of a free society is the provision of needed conclusions, properly supported by statistics and moral indignation, for those in a position to pay for them.

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.