John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

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 certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

Also present, as a kind of co-host, was the rector of the state university. He asked me if I knew the difference between capitalism and socialism. In capitalism man exploits man. In socialism it is just the reverse.

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

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.

The rule is that financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation.

When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.

Out of that belief, thus instilled, then comes action — the bidding up of values, whether in land, securities, or, as recently, art. The upward movement confirms the commitment to personal and group wisdom. And so on to the moment of mass disillusion and the crash. This last, it will now be sufficiently evident, never comes gently. It is always accompanied by a desperate and largely unsuccessful effort to get out.

In recent times the no-business meeting at the White House — attended by governors, industrialists, representatives of business, labor, and agriculture — has become an established institution of government.

Regulation and more orthodox economic knowledge are not what protect the individual and the financial institution when euphoria returns, leading on as it does to wonder at the increase in values and wealth, to the rush to participate that drives up prices, and to the eventual crash and its sullen and painful aftermath. There is protection only in a clear perception of the characteristics common to these flights into what must conservatively be described as mass insanity. Only then is the investor warned and saved.

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

Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.

Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people — the degrading lust of gain…or the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors.

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.