Author Profile
John Kenneth Galbraith
1908 – 2006 • American • Economist
60
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 60 quotesIt 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
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.— John Kenneth Galbraith
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.— John Kenneth Galbraith
The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.— John Kenneth Galbraith
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.— John Kenneth Galbraith
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.— John Kenneth Galbraith
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.— John Kenneth Galbraith
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.— John Kenneth Galbraith
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
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
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.— John Kenneth Galbraith
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