458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

In 1736, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was “with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful.” The press was busy printing money.

Anyone who says he won’t resign four times, will.

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.

I predict, not because I know, but because I’m asked.

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.

Much of the world’s work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can’t be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.

Here in briefest form is the modern political dialectic. It is an unequal contest: the rich and the comfortable have influence and money. And they vote. The concerned and the poor have numbers, but many of the poor, alas, do not vote. There is democracy, but in no slight measure it is a democracy of the fortunate.

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