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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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John Kenneth Galbraith , also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-born economist, public official and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, a time during which Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, American Capitalism , The Affluent Society , and The New Industrial State . Some of his work has been criticized by economists such as Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman and Robert Solow.

Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration. His political activism, literary output and outspokenness brought him wide fame during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of the few to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his public service and contributions to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. October 1908 – 29. April 2006
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
John Kenneth Galbraith: 207 quotes1 like

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

“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 book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 11, Section IV, p. 130

“The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 184 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 178 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 8, Section II, p. 87

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1982), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 972

“Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath I, Section IV, p 139 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXXV, Section 2, p. 390

“Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

on Friedman's advising of the Israeli government, "The Private Man and the Public Life; Interview With Galbraith", The Washington Post (26 April 1981)

“It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.”

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 II, p. 70

“In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful."”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The press was busy printing money.
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter V, Of Paper, p. 54

“Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 5, Section I, p. 47

“That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XII, Section 1, p. 142

“In a community wherepublic services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 18, Section II, p. 203

“I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Booknotes interview (1994)

“And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section VII, p 190 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208

“The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section II, p 111 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 1, p. 27

“Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter X, Section 5, p. 122 (Mr. Galbraith was originally an agricultural economist...)

“There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter I, Money, p. 4

“In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.”

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 IV, In Goldman Sachs We Trust, Section VI, p. 63

“The Coolidge Bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section I, p 109 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Guardian [UK] (28 July 1989)

“Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 1, p. 30 (On Robert Owen)

“Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 25, Section III, p. 274

“I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge — that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 2, p. 84

“One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 11, Section II, p. 125

“A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXIX, Section 7, p. 339-340

“Excessive acreages of unused buildings, commercial and residential were created. The need for such construction, given the space demands of modern business bureaucracy, was believed to be without limit. In later consequence, the solvency of numerous banks, including that of some of the nation's largest and most prestigious institutions, was either fatally impaired or placed in doubt. The lending of both those that failed or were endangered and others was subject, by fear and example to curtailment. The construction industry was severely constrained and its workers left unemployed. A general recession ensued. Any early warning as to what was happening would have been exceptionally ill received, seen as yet another invasion of the benign rule of laissez faire and a specific interference with the market. However in keeping with the exceptions to this rule, there would be eventual salvation in a government bailout of the banks. Insurance of bank deposits — a far from slight contribution to contentment — was permissible, as well as assurance that were a bank large enough, it would not be allowed to fail. A preventive role by government was not allowed; eventual government rescue was highly acceptable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Culture of Contentment

Source: The Culture of Contentment (1992), Ch. 5

“But there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section VIII, p 192 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“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

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 2, p. 75

“One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath I, Section II, p 135 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VIII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath II, Section IV, p 155 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Article in The Saturday Evening Post, 1968 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxsfAQAAMAAJ&amp;q=%22The+drive+toward+complex+technical+achievement+offers+a+clue+to+why+the+U.S.+is+good+at+space+gadgetry+and+bad+at+slum+problems%22&amp;pg=PA86

“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The United States (1971)

“Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Made to Last (1964), ch. 4

“The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 9, p. 258

“While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XV, Section 2, p. 169

“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 book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 6, Section III, p. 63

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“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 <br class="br">The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“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