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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes - Page 6

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

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
People, Important, Hunger
John Kenneth Galbraith (2007). “The New Industrial State”, p.496, Princeton University Press

The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Class, Next Day, One Day
"The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 2, p. 60, 1977.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Time, Autumn, Humans
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (1962). “THE GREAT CRASH 1929”

Much of the world's work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Men, Done, World
The Age of Uncertainty ch. 3 (1977)

According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Air, Public Opinion, Balls
John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.493, Princeton University Press

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
Formulas
"A Journey Through Economic Time". "Booknotes" with Brian Lamb, www.c-span.org. September 23, 1994.

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Imperfect, Incompetence, Oligopoly
John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.226, Princeton University Press

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Party, Romance, Elements
Source: www.progressive.org

Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Order, Goering, Nazism

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Saving, Individual, Consumerism
"The New Industrial State".

Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Design, Innovation, Variation

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
War, Priorities, May
John Kenneth Galbraith (2017). “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, p.106, Princeton University Press

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Believe, Race, Special
"The United States". The New York magazine article on November 15, 1971, reprinted in "A View from the Stands", 1986.

In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent

John Kenneth Galbraith
Economics, Consistent, Wiser

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Technology, Problem, Modern
John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Government, Economics, Inflation
"The affluent society".

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Beach, Ocean, Vacation
"The Beach Book". Book by Gloria Steinem, 1963.

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Past, Yield, Ideas
John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Atheism, Taste, Language

There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Pain, Business, Drunk

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Ordinary, Buying, Emotion
"The psychology of impulsive shopping" by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, www.theguardian.com. November 26, 2015.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Men, Investing, May
"The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977.

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

John Kenneth Galbraith
Influence, Accepting, Subjects
John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.59, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Wisdom, Knowledge, Mean
John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.14, Princeton University Press

Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Vacuums, Culture, Oratory
984 Speech at the American University, Washington DC. Quoted in Time magazine, 18 Jun.

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