Authors:

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes - Page 3

All Quotes Achievement Advertising Age Alcohol Avoiding Business Capitalism Change Choices Commitment Community Competition Conflict Country Culture Democracy Desire Doubt Economics Economy Effort Energy Exercise Expectations Federal Reserve Finance Food Freedom Genius Giving Great Depression House Hunger Ignorance Inflation Inspirational Language Liberty Life Lifetime Lying Madness Management Memories Money Myth Office Opportunity Past Peace Persuasion Planning Politics Poverty Progress Reality Reputation Responsibility Revolution Running School Science Security Society Taxes Technology Virtue Wall War Wealth Wisdom Work Writing
Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Fashion, Thinking, Would Be
"John Kenneth Galbraith: Free Market Fraud' by John Kenneth Galbraith, progressive.org. April 12, 2006.

I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Government, Political, Favors
Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes C-SPAN, November 13, 1994.

The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Confused, Voice, Mass
"In love with business" by George Monbiot, www.theguardian.com. May 14, 2001.

Happiness does not require an expanding economy

John Kenneth Galbraith
Business, Doe, Management

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Men, Errors, Doors
John Kenneth Galbraith (1969). “The affluent society”, Hamish Hamilton

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Real, Science, Technology
1967 The New Industrial State.

Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Couple, Mean, Responsibility
Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes C-SPAN, November 13, 1994.

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Money, Doctrine, Littles
The Guardian, November 20, 1991.

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Life, Acceptance, Comfort
The Guardian, July 28, 1989.

World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists.

John Kenneth Galbraith
War, Two, Differences

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Simple, Mind, Bankers
John Kenneth Galbraith (2017). “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, p.22, Princeton University Press

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Struggle, Giving, Choices

Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Ignorance, Passion, Wish

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
Funny Inspirational, Food, Weight Loss
John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.101, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Believe, People, World
John Kenneth Galbraith (2009). “The Great Crash 1929”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Father, America, Important

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

John Kenneth Galbraith
May, Heroic, Madness
John Kenneth Galbraith (2009). “The Great Crash 1929”, p.82, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
Life, Reality, Men
John Kenneth Galbraith (2009). “The Great Crash 1929”, p.93, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Change, Peace, Men

It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Believe, People, Needs
John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.272, Princeton University Press

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Thinking, Agreement, People

It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Survival, Phrases, Survival Of The Fittest

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Love, Money, Men
"The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 6, p. 161, 1977.

Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Investing, Pundits, Knows

A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Greatness, Proust, Fame
John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.141, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

You May Also Like: