John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

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

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.

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.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.

Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

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.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

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

There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

War remains the decisive human failure.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.

I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.

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

There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . .

If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.

The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.

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

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.

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.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.

I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated.

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.

I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.