John Kenneth Galbraith famous quotes

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

#Honesty #Integrity #Philosophy

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Government #Employment #Economics

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Funny #Witty #Men

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Simple #Mind #Investing

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Funny Inspirational #Food #America

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Inspirational #Life #Beauty

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

#Inspirational #Change #Sweet

It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Important #Serious

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Business #Awards #Achievement

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

#Reality #Men #Facts

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

#Life #Motivational #Jobs

In economics, the majority is always wrong.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Inspirational #Majority #Economics

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

#Astrology #Looks #Economic

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

#Peace #Men #Mind

To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Errors #Choices #Rivals

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Inspiration #Successful #Doors

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#People #House #Fuel

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

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

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Ordinary #Buying #Emotion

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Art #Freedom #Nerd

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.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Inspirational #Motivational #Leadership

Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Reality #Forever #Trying

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

#Investing #Taught #Should

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Horse #Oats #Generations

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

#Wisdom #Knowledge #Pieces

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Divorce #Firsts #Life Is

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

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Political #Four

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Money #Simple #Mind

People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Educational #Sea #People

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Class #Rich

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

#Anchors #Sea #Investing

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

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Believe #Suffering #Economic

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

#Wealth #Prosperity #Finance

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Freedom #Memories #Political

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Faith #Desire #Economic

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

#Laughter #Mistake #Humorous

The traveler to the United States will do wellto prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Class #United States #Consciousness

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Reality #Men #Littles

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Past #Errors #Giving

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Work #Unemployment

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Wisdom #Knowledge #Mean

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

And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Loyalty #Military #Reality

No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Work #Work Ethic #Ethics

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

#Education #Degrees #Arthur