John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.

Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.

Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.

There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.

Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

It is in the long run that the corporation lives.

Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

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

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.

Ralph [ Nader] is an old friend of mine, and he does a useful job in displaying a position.

I'm certainly going to support Al Gore because, on the whole, he's the more sensible figure and you vote not for the perfect but for the best. Coupled with that is a special situation.

I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.

I accept the global complex and global trade more than do some of my liberal colleagues because I consider this a wise alternative to national tension and conflict.

We're all subject to the daily pressures of consumer persuasion.

I talked about the consolidation of power in the hands of the corporate bureaucracy, as distinct from the stockholders. To this view, I still strongly adhere.

The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

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

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.

The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.

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

I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.