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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   quotes 1   like

John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

“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

“No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousandshares ofGeneral Motors or General Electric.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXXV, Section 3, p. 394

“Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VIII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath II, Section VI, p 165
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Life , People , Youth , Age

“It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 1, p. 13

“There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XIV, When The Money Stopped, p. 183-184.

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter I, Money, p. 5

Money , Truth , Study

“But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 328

Fear , Question

“The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations… But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)

“The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 18, Section II, p. 201

Wealth

“I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Booknotes interview (1994)

Life , Intelligence , Personality

“At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.”

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. 190

Time

“What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XVI, The Coming of J.M. Keynes, p. 217

Money

“By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter III, Section 5, p. 32

Age

“Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 17, Section I, p. 190

“It is in the long run that the corporation lives.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 15, Section IV, p. 172

“Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Introduction, Section I, p. ix
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Question , Business , Problem

“American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 2, p. 60

Universe

“In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.”

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 I, A Year To Remember, p. 5

Autumn , Time

“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 330

People , Error , Feeling , Thinking

“Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter VIII, The Great Compromise, p. 92

Money , War , Truth

“Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 1, p. 11

Children , Idea

“It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

A Journey Through Economic Time (1994)

Error

“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

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

Horse

“If a man be subject to the authority of another, he can at least ask that it not be an occasion for glee.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXV, Section 2, p. 293 (1985)

“More generally, the individual who gets added income as a result of a general inflationary movement atributes it not to larger economic causes but to his own virtue and diligence.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXII, Section 4, p. 263 (1985)

“Should there be sacrifice, as always in the mature corporation, it is not suffered by those who agree to it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXII, Section 4, p. 262 (1985)

Suffering

“Nothing so effectively economizes effort and intelligence, as distinct from anxiety, as the knowledge that nothing can be done.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter VIII, Section 1, p. 91 (1985)

Intelligence , Knowledge , Effort

“We may lay it down as a rule that the older the exercise of any power, the more benign it will appear, and the more recent its assumption, the more unnatural and even dangerous it will seem.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter V, Section 4, p. 58 (1985)

Appearance , Exercises