Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith (American Economist)

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) was a Canadian-born American economist and public servant. A leading scholar of the American Institutionalist school, he is one of the most famous economists of the post-World War II era.

Born in Iona Station, Ontario, and educated at the universities of Toronto, California, and Cambridge, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1931. In 1939, he became an assistant professor of economics at Princeton and held various administrative posts before becoming a professor of economics at Harvard 1949–75. He was U.S. ambassador to India 1961–63.

A Keynesian economist, Galbraith advocated government spending to stimulate the economy. He criticized American society’s obsession for consumer goods, arguing that a more significant portion of wealth should be spent on infrastructure, education, and other improvements shared by the public.

Galbraith was also known for the literary excellence of his writing on public affairs. His works include American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1952,) The Great Crash (1955,) The Affluent Society (1958,) The Liberal Hour (1960,) The New Industrial State (1967,) The Age of Uncertainty (1977,) which was made into a BBC television series, The Anatomy of Power (1983,) The Culture of Contentment (1992,) and The Good Society (1996.)

Galbraith also wrote his autobiography, A Life in Our Times (1981.) He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice—in 1946 and 2000.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Kenneth Galbraith

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Virtue, Virtues

The happiest time of anyone’s life is just after the first divorce.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Divorce

The traveler to the United States will do well to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Class

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Politics

The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Technology

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Guilt

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economy

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Crime, Criminals

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Reality

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Money

In economics the majority is always wrong.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economy, Economics

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral hilosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
—John Kenneth Galbraith

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wealth

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Business

Few things are more tempting to a writer than to repeat, admiringly, what he has said before.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Writers

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economics

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Audiences

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wisdom

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Politics

Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.
—John Kenneth Galbraith

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Originality, Thinking

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Democracy

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Police, Control

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Attention

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Boredom

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Criticism

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Twentieth Century

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Government

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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Accomplishment

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Failures, Immortality, Mistakes

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