Top 403 Quotes & Sayings by John Kenneth Galbraith - Page 3

Only foolish people are completely secure.

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.

Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them.

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

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

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.

I do the best with what exists.

In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.

The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.

Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.

Much of the world's work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

More investment trusts securities were offered in September of 1929 even than in August - the total was above $600 million. However, the nearly simultaneous promotion of Shenandoah and Blue Ridge was to stand as the pinnacle of new era finance. It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.

The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

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

Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians" ... Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons ... This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.

Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.

Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?

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

According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.

Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor.

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.

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.

You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.

People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.

Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.

Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.

Foresight is an imperfect thing - all prevision in economics is imperfect.

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

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.

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.

Conscience is better served by a myth.

In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.

A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.

Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.

Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.

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

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

Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.

The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.