John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.

Broadly speaking, [Keynesianism means] that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

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 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.

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

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it becameNew York, London or Tokyo.

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

Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.

One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find.

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

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.