A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Quote Topics

Between Capital Dialectic Economic Enterprise Great Labor Our Our Time Some State Still Supposed Time

Quote Author

John Kenneth Galbraith
American - Economist
October 15, 1908 - April 29, 2006

I'd love if people relearned the lessons of the 20th century all over again. Which is to say this country progressed economically and socially when we had a better balance between capital and labor. Neither capital or labor won every argument. The battle between the two created economic tension, and transformed the working class into the middle class, and grew the economy.

David Simon

Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker - a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.

Louis O. Kelso

The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done.

Leland Stanford

From my earliest acquaintance with the science of political economy, it has been evident to my mind that capital was the product of labor, and that therefore, in its best analysis there could be no natural conflict between capital and labor.

Leland Stanford

It is time that capital and labor realized that their interests are really comutual, as interdependent as the brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed Poverty, Ignorance and Vice... Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase - it cannot concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism.

William Cowper Brann

Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict, which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision. Such is not the case in the slaveholding States.

John C. Calhoun

The traditional divide between left and right, capital and labor, small state and big state, high taxes and low taxes doesn't define politics in the way it did in the past.

Leo Varadkar

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations.

Eleanor Roosevelt

In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.

James Surowiecki

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

I don't see the minimum wage as a fight between capital and labor, between persistent small businesses and diligent employees. I think offering New Mexicans a pathway out of poverty helps all of us, no matter which side of the check you sign.

Michelle Lujan Grisham

It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it, and in some ways the great ideological wars of the 20th century that cost so many lives had to do with whether to have managed economies directed by government or economies directed by the free movement of capital, which is only partially subject to government regulation.

Robert Hass

Is the investment community critical to our economic success? Yes. Free markets, innovation, access to credit, venture capital, and strong labor rights - these have been the underpinnings of our economic vitality, from laying railways to broadband lines.

Reshma Saujani

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

Elena Ferrante

Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.