A Quote by James K. Galbraith

I can't resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school- including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, "would not have been possible without the contribution of these men." They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They'd all left the country in the 1930s.

James K. Galbraith

Quote Topics

Been Celebrated Centennial Contribution Country Dawned Economic Economics Economists Father Hayek Including Institute Invited John Kenneth Leading Left Many Meant Men Moment Occasion Possible Reflect Republic Resist Returned Said School Since Speaker Telling Them Took Triumphs Until Vienna Von Von Hayek War Which Without Would Years Years Ago

Quote Author

James K. Galbraith
American - Economist
Born: January 29, 1952

The Austrian School came into existence when a bunch of Viennese rent-gouging landlords didn't want rent control on the rents they could gouge out of their tenants in old Vienna, so they hired a bunch of scribblers - and that's the Austrian School.

Webster Tarpley

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

Walter Kohn

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

Abraham Pais

The oldest [John Kenneth] Galbraith rule is that when you hear that a new era has dawned, you should take cover.

John Kenneth Galbraith

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

George Stigler

John von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!

Richard P. Feynman

My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

Walter Kohn

At the heart of capitalism is the unification of knowledge and power. As Friedrich Hayek, the leader of the Austrian school of economics, put it, "To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind... is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world." Because knowledge is dispersed, power must be as well.

George Gilder

The first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major scale was neither a neuroscientist nor a computer scientist but .. a Viennes economist: Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). A man of exceptionally broad knowledge and profound insight into the operation of complex systems, Hayek applied such insight with remarkable success to economics (Nobel Prize, 1974), sociology, political science, jurisprudence, evolutionary theory, psychology, and brain science (Hayek, 1952).

Joaquin Fuster

The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.

Angus Deaton

There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.

George Polya

My father was an Austrian, and he brought some Torahs over to this country, ancient Torahs that were slipped out of Germany.

Martin Landau

Being the keynote speaker at the convention this year is an honor I don't take lightly. I know I've got some big shoes to fill. Two conventions ago, the keynote speaker was a guy named Barack Obama.

Julian Castro

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.