Top 300 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that. I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favor of privatization,’ or, ‘I’m deeply in favor of public ownership.’ I’m in favor of whatever works in the particular case.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

52. “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

53. “The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

54. “Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

55. “A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I’ve put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

56. “To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

57. “Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

58. “There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

59. “If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

60. “The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

61. “Foresight is an imperfect thing – all prevision in economics is imperfect.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

62. “Economics is not an exact science.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

63. “The process by which money is created is so simply that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

64. “In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

65. “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

67. “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

68. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

69. “In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

70. “Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

71. “Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

72. “I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

73. “There’s no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

74. “To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

75. “Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

76. “Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

77. “Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply; things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We’re a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

78. “I’ve been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

79. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

81. “Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

83. “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

84. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

85. “Happiness does not require an expanding economy.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

86. “The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great – a little understood thing.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

87. “No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

88. “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

89. “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

90. “All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

91. “Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

92. “But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

93. “The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

94. “Conscience is better served by a myth.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

95. “Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

96. “Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

97. “Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

98. “Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

99. “You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

100. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith