90 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

John Kenneth Galbraith was an economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual.

From the ’50s until the 2000s, his economic-related publications were big sellers. He was an institutionalist economist who had a tendency to favor post-Keynesian economics.

He authored more than a thousand articles and essays on diverse topics and penned four dozen books, including numerous novels. In the Kennedy administration, he represented the United States as ambassador to India. During his lifetime, he achieved a widespread reputation thanks to his political involvement, creative output, and outspokenness.

On Mar 26, 1986, he made an appearance in a conversation with history to talk about American political leadership's approach to the Cold War.

In 1963, Galbraith's description of his upbringing in southern Ontario's Elgin County was included. It was, in his opinion, his best writing.

Now let's go over some of his thought-provoking quotes on employment, art, and more.

Here is a list of John Kenneth Galbraith quotes that will fulfill your expectation.

"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil."

-The Great Crash of 1929.

"The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses."

"If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."

-The Great Crash of 1929

"Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the person who asserts it and the manner of its assertion."

-The Great Crash of 1929

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of the person's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

"Of all classes, the rich are the most noticed and the least studied."

"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"

"All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment."

-A Short History of Financial Euphoria

"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."

"Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism."

"A person, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down."

-The Age of Uncertainty

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

"Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous."

-The Affluent Society

"The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London, or Tokyo."

"There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations."

"The rule will often be here reiterated: financial genius is before the fall."

-A Short History of Financial Euphoria

"Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all."

"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."

"Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not."

"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."

"Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear."

"We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect."

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

"In the world of minor lunacy, the behavior of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd."

-The Affluent Society

"Men of conservative temperament have long suspected that one thing leads to another."

"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions."

"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."

"The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."

"Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent."

-Name-Dropping

"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."

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

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

"The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence to them."

-The Affluent Society

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

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

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

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

"It 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."

"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."

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

"All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door."

"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."

"If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old."

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

"Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved."

-A Short History of Financial Euphoria

"Prime threat hovering over a society of general well-being."

-The Affluent Society

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

"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."

"The person who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, and have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not."

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

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

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

"I have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world."

-A Short History of Financial Euphoria

"One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read."

"The process by which money is created is so simply that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent."

-Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went

"The second factor contributing to speculative euphoria and programmed collapse is the specious association of money and intelligence."

-A Short History of Financial Euphoria

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

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

"Nothing in modern attitudes is believed more to signify exceptional intelligence than association with large pools of money. Only immediate experience with those so situated denies the myth."

-The Good Society: The Humane Agenda

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

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

"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."

"War remains the decisive human failure."

"In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."

"Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get an agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."

Here are some John Kenneth Galbraith quotes on economics that most people will agree on.

(John Kenneth was made the US Ambassador to India for a brief period during the '60s)

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

"One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know."

"In economics, the majority is always wrong."

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

"The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version. All financial innovation involves in one form or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets."
-A Short History of Financial Euphoria

"If the state is the executive committee of the great corporation and the planning system, it is partly because neoclassical economics is its instrument for neutralizing the suspicion that this is so."

"Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised."

"If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows."

-Referring to 'trickle-down' economics

"Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried."

"Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects."

"To proclaim the need for new ideas has served, in some measure, as a substitute for them."

-The Affluent Society

"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."

"In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth."

-The Affluent Society

"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."

"The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience. Rather, in eliding power in making economics a nonpolitical subject neoclassical theory destroys its relation to the real world."

"Economists are generally negligent of their heroes."

-The Age of Uncertainty

Here is a list of John Kenneth Galbraith quotes on politics that will provoke your thinking.

"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory."

"There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose."

"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

"There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished."

"Under capitalism, a person exploits a person. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

"It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state."

"Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative."

"In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes."