458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

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

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.

A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.

The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

From the spring of 1941, I controlled all prices in the United States. You could lower a price without my permission, but you couldn't raise a price without my permission or that of my staff.