J. K. Galbraith Quotes
The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process.
If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.
The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
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.
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
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.
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.
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.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.
Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . .
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
The American colonies, all know, were greatly opposed to taxation without representation. They were also, a less celebrated quality, equally opposed to taxation with representation.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.
Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
