Top 300 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

205. “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

206. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

210. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

213. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

218. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

221. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

226. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

230. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

232. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

234. “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

235. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

242. “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

243. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

245. “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

246. “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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

250. “The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith