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“In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.”

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 V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section VII, p. 85

Way

“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 book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 2, Section VI, p. 26

Idea

“Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXXIII, Section 4, p. 375

Education , Dependency

“The inevitable counterpart of specialization is organization. This is what brings the work of specialists to a coherent result. If there are many specialists, this coordination will be a major task. So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists on organization and organizations of specialists on organization. More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), p. 16

Business

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

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XVI, Section 2, p. 182

“Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter VI, An Instrument of Revolution, p. 62

“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

The Guardian [UK] (20 November 1991)

Money

“Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 6, p. 180

World

“No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter V https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, The Crash, Section VIII, p. 106
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Knowledge

“A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section IV, p 115
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Money , People

“There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter VI, Section 7, p. 71

Decision

“In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XX, Where It Went, p. 285

“The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring.”

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 V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section IV, p. 76

Money

“Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Age of Uncertainty (1977), BBC Television series (also published in book form, non verbatim version)

Truth

“In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Quoted by Graham Allison , in A Conversation with Henry Kissinger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPqxISYxjcI

“Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The United States (1971)

People , Peace , Color , History

“To the man who held stock on margin, disaster had only one face and that was falling prices. But now prices were to be allowed to fall. The speculator's only comfort, henceforth, was that his ruin would be accomplished in an orderly and becoming manner.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)
Source: Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section II, p 110

“The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XI, The Fall, p. 136

Future

“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

"Free Market Fraud" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Economics/FreeMarketFraudGalbraith.html, The Progressive (January 1999)

Money , Fashion , Thinking , Change

“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

A History of Economics (1991), ch. 21

Time