Top 300 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

252. “I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can’t be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

253. “One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

254. “Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

255. “Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

256. “No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

257. “Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection of the state.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

258. “Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

259. “There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

260. “Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

261. “Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

262. “In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour – for the jobs – that are not provided.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

263. “We talk of the enormous virtues of work, but it turns out that that is mostly for the poor. If you’re rich enough or if you’re a college professor, the virtue lies in leisure and the use you make of your leisure time.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

264. “Men of conservative temperament have long suspected that one thing leads to another.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

265. “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

266. “In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

267. “Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

268. “It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

269. “Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

270. “Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

271. “Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

272. “The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

273. “Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

274. “But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

275. “Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

276. “There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

277. “There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

278. “It is the good fortune of the affluent country that the opportunity cost of economic discussion is low and hence it can afford all kinds.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

279. “It is a well known and very important fact that America’s founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

280. “The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

281. “I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

282. “THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

283. “A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil’s policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

284. “No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

285. “It is not the individual’s right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller’s right to manage the individual.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

286. “Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

287. “Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

288. “It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

289. “In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

290. “Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

291. “In 1736, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was “with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful.” The press was busy printing money.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

292. “In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

293. “Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

294. “That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

295. “What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

296. “Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

297. “The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version. All financial innovation involves in one form or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

298. “Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

299. “It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

300. “However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less – and probably was much less – than a million.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith