Top 300 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

103. “In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

104. “While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

105. “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

106. “Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

107. “The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

108. “According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

109. “The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

110. “Nothing so weakens a government as inflation.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

112. “I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

113. “Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

114. “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

115. “The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

116. “We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

117. “There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

118. “All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

119. “Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

120. “In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

122. “Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

123. “Some things were never meant to be recycled.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

124. “The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

125. “The family which takes it mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

126. “The American colonies, all know, were greatly opposed to taxation without representation. They were also, a less celebrated quality, equally opposed to taxation with representation.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

127. “Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

128. “In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

131. “Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

132. “What is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

134. “Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

135. “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

136. “Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

137. “Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

138. “The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

140. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

141. “I would now, however, more strongly emphasize, and especially as to the United States, the inequality in income and that it is getting worse – that the poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasing egregiously. So is the political eloquence and power by which that income is defended. This I did not foresee.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

143. “The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

145. “The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

148. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

149. “Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

150. “Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith