John Kenneth Galbraith > Quotes

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs

“I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
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― John Kenneth Galbraith

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

“If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“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, The Age of Uncertainty

“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. ”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

…

Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929

“We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went

“Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“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.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929