John Kenneth Galbraith

"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."

"In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons."

"Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell."

"No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed."

"The Coolidge Bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable."

"To the man who held stock on margin, disaster had only one face and that was falling prices. But now prices were to be allowed to fall. The speculator's only comfort, henceforth, was that his ruin would be accomplished in an orderly and becoming manner."

"Our political life favors the extremes of speech; the man who is gifted in the arts of abuse is bound to be a notable, if not always a great figure."

"The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible."

"Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for the present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities."

"A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no."

"Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves."

"Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account."

"One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find."

"Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action."

"In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading asyndicate that was driving the market down."

"However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy."

"Our political tradition sets great store by the generalized symbol of evil. This is the wrongdoer whose wrongdoing will be taken by the public to be the secret propensity of a whole community or class."

"Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals."

"In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class."

"Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile."

"The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds."

"Both of these measures were on the side of increasing spendable income, though unfortunately they were largely without effect. The tax reductions were negligible except in the higher income brackets; businessmen who promised to maintain investment and wages, in accordance with a well-understood convention, considered the promise binding only for the period within which it was not financially disadvantageous to do so."

"The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories."

"And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner."

"At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean."

"But there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong."

"But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound."

"Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others."

"Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive."

"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events."

"Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend."

"Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described."

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

"Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it."

"The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated."

"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little."

"We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce."

"One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish."

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."

"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."

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

"It is in the long run that the corporation lives."

"Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are."

"The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground."

"The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt."

"In a community wherepublic services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway."

"Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage."

""Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace."

"Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy."

"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."