John Kenneth Galbraith

"In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well."

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

"Also present, as a kind of co-host, was the rector of the state university. He asked me if I knew the difference between capitalism and socialism. In capitalism man exploits man. In socialism it is just the reverse."

"There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting."

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

"In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which."

"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."

"Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay."

"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. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first."

"The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society....I am led to the conclusion that we are the servants in thought, as in action, of the machines we have created to serve us."

"Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."

"You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too."

"In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability."

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

"Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths."

"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."

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

"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."

"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."

"Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man... begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies."

"Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant."

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

"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."

"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."

"In the first place I identify this ["the equilibrium of poverty"] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized."

"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."

"We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much."

"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."

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

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

"The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness."

"We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York."

"It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure."

"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."

"When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble — until the day of disaster."

"Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes — indeed, deletes — the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity."

"Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising."

"The modern conservative is, in fact, not especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness."

"The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems."

"Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?"

"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."

"SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year."

"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."

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

"This view that the action of the Federal Reserve authorities in 1927 was responsible for the speculation and collapse which followed has never been seriously shaken. There are reasons why it is attractive. It is simple, and it exonerates both the American people and the economic system from substantial blame... Yet the explanation obviously assumes that people will always speculate if only they can get the money to finance it. Nothing could be farther from the case. There were times before and there has been long periods since when credit was plentiful and cheap—far cheaper than in 1927-29—and when speculation was negligible. Nor was speculation out of control after 1927, except that it was beyond the reach of men who did not want in the least to control it. The explanation is a tribute only to a recurrent preference, in economic matters, for formidable nonsense."

"Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the most unpredictable in their consequences."

"In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel."

"To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend."

"It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence."

"The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring."