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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes | Quotes said by John Kenneth Galbraith

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #1

    A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.


  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #2

    All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #3

    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 Quote #4

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

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #5

    Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #6

    Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #7

    Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #8

    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.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #9

    I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #10

    If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #11

    In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #12

    In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

    …

    Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #13

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

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #14

    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.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #15

    Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #16

    Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #17

    More die in the United States of too much food than of too little

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #18

    More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #19

    None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #20

    Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #21

    One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #22

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

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #23

    Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #24

    That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #25

    The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #26

    The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #27

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

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience of the comfortable. There could be a disturbing feeling, however fleeting, of unease, even guilt.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith Quote #30

    The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

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