Top 300 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It’s great to be with William Buckley, because you don’t have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you’re right.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

152. “Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

153. “Anyone who says he won’t resign four times, will.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

154. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

155. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

156. “If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

157. “Power is as power does.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

158. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

159. “The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

160. “One must always have in mind one simple fact – there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

161. “Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

162. “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

163. “Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

164. “Much of the world’s work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

165. “Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

166. “Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

167. “All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It’s a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

168. “People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

169. “We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

170. “Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

171. “We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

172. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

173. “Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

174. “It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

175. “Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

176. “Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

177. “You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

178. “Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

180. “Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

181. “Speculation, it has been noted, comes when popular imagination settles on something seemingly new in the field of commerce or finance.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

182. “The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

183. “Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

184. “I have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

185. “If a man didn’t make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

186. “It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

188. “There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

189. “Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

190. “Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

191. “The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence. The production reflects the low marginal utility of the goods to society. The income reflects the high total utility of a livelihood to a person.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

192. “Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

193. “All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

194. “Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

195. “Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

196. “Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

197. “Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are not missed.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

198. “The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

200. “Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith