Top 300 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

202. “One man’s consumption becomes his neighbor’s wish.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

203. “In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

204. “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

205. “It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

206. “A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

207. “Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

208. “When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder...”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

209. “The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

210. “I predict, not because I know, but because I’m asked.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

211. “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

212. “Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

214. “Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

215. “The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

216. “The second factor contributing to speculative euphoria and programmed collapse is the specious association of money and intelligence.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

217. “Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

219. “My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

220. “There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

222. “Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

223. “In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

224. “There’s a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

225. “American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

226. “Galbraith’s First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

227. “Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

228. “Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

229. “At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

230. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

231. “The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

232. “The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

233. “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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

234. “In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

235. “The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

236. “I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

237. “Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

238. “No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

239. “No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn’t know itself.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

240. “The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

241. “It’s a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

242. “When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

243. “From the spring of 1941, I controlled all prices in the United States. You could lower a price without my permission, but you couldn’t raise a price without my permission or that of my staff.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

244. “Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don’t have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That’s its principal function. It’s a very good system, really – keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

245. “If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

246. “Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

247. “Here in briefest form is the modern political dialectic. It is an unequal contest: the rich and the comfortable have influence and money. And they vote. The concerned and the poor have numbers, but many of the poor, alas, do not vote. There is democracy, but in no slight measure it is a democracy of the fortunate.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

248. “I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

249. “If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

250. “A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith