John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes - Page 3

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

I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.

Ralph [ Nader] is an old friend of mine, and he does a useful job in displaying a position.

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

In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

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

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

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

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

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

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

People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

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

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.

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

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

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

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

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

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

But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.

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

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

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

For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.

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

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

To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.

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

Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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

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

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