John Kenneth Galbraith People Quotations

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

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

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

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

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.

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get 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.

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

There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.

Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money

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.

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

Men will look back in amusement at the pretence that once caused people to refer to General Dynamics and North American Aviation and AT&T as private business.

Only foolish people are completely secure.

It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the dispiriting voices of doubt be muted and that there should be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence. Just a month before the crash, Irving Fisher was saying: "There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash".

If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.

Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians" ... Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons ... This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.

Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.

If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.

Man, 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.

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

It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

From the fact of general well-being came the new position of the poor. They were now in most communities a minority. The voice of the people was now the voice of relative affluence. Politicians in pursuit of votes could be expected to have a diminishing concern for the very poor. Compassion would have to serve instead - an uncertain substitute.

The ideas by which people . . . interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.

People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

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.