J. K. Galbraith Quotes

Power is as power does.

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

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

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.

Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.

Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.

Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.

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

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

Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.

Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.

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

It is in the long run that the corporation lives.

Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

The oldest [John Kenneth] Galbraith rule is that when you hear that a new era has dawned, you should take cover.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.

Ralph [ Nader] is an old friend of mine, and he does a useful job in displaying a position.

I'm certainly going to support Al Gore because, on the whole, he's the more sensible figure and you vote not for the perfect but for the best. Coupled with that is a special situation.

I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.

I accept the global complex and global trade more than do some of my liberal colleagues because I consider this a wise alternative to national tension and conflict.

We're all subject to the daily pressures of consumer persuasion.

I talked about the consolidation of power in the hands of the corporate bureaucracy, as distinct from the stockholders. To this view, I still strongly adhere.

The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks....

the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...

Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.

She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness, " she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill

Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.

In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.

Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.

Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.

Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?