John Kenneth Galbraith: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

Pain , Thinking

“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

“Stop the Madness,” Interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail (6 July 2002) (see http://wist.info/galbraith-john-kenneth/7463/ )

For Men , Exercises , Search , Selfishness

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Though often attributed to Galbraith, as early as 1988 in U.S. News & World Report, the earliest publications of this statement, in The Bulletin (1984) and Reader's Digest (1985) attributes it to Ezra Solomon.
Misattributed

“Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: A Life in Our Times

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

People

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

Economics, Peace and Laughter (1971), p. 50

Business , Change

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

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 9, Section II, p. 103

Food

“If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XIII, The Self Inflicted Wounds, p. 176

Error

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

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

"Recession Economics," New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 1 (4 February 1982)
Context: 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.

Horse

“Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism (1986)

People , Way , Understanding , Nature

“Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 2, p. 44

Study

“But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter X, Cause and Consequence, p. 199

Life , Men , History , Communication

“Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

BBC TV Adaptation, Episode 1
The Age of Uncertainty (1977)

Life , People

“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)

People , Happiness

“One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Interview with John Newark (1990) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004), ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield