John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.

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

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

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.

Conscience is better served by a myth.

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

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

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

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

Only foolish people are completely secure.

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

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.

I do the best with what exists.

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

The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.

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

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

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.

The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

With the American failure came world failure.

Economics is not an exact science.

THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.

In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.

One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.

What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.

Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.

The ideas by which people . . . interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.

The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.

Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.

If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.

I feel very angry when I think of brilliant, or even interesting, women whose minds are wasted on a home. Better have an affair. It isn't permanent and you keep your job.

Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.

While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.

For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.

The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.

From the spring of 1941, I controlled all prices in the United States. You could lower a price without my permission, but you couldn't raise a price without my permission or that of my staff.

There was the Missile Crisis, but one can't attribute to the [J.F.] Kennedy years anything like the problems that [Franklin] Roosevelt stood over and surmounted.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.