Quotes by
John Kenneth Galbraith |
1908-2006 , American-Canadian economist
A leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.He was professor of economics in Harvard and a prolific author. His books on economic topics were bestsellers, such as the trilogy American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967).
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Quotations
| • | The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 12 |
| • | The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. 8 |
| • | Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. (Letter to John F. Kennedy ,2 March 1962) 7 |
| • | Power is as power does. 5 |
| • | Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result. 5 |
| • | All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum. 4 |
| • | Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied. 3 |
| • | The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo. |
| • | War remains the decisive human failure. |
| • | It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. |
| • | More die in the United States of too much food than of too little. |
| • | Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. |
| • | All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. |
| • | Conscience is better served by a myth. |
| • | Economics is not an exact science. |
| • | The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt. |
| • | In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence. |
| • | The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. |
| • | The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems. |
| • | Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. |
| • | People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. |
| • | I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure. |
| • | One must always have in mind one simple fact: there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor. |
| • | When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. |
| • | In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. |
| • | Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. |
| • | In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability. |
| • | 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. |
| • | There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. |