John Kenneth Galbraith

At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

But there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

It is in the long run that the corporation lives.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The inevitable counterpart of specialization is organization. This is what brings the work of specialists to a coherent result. If there are many specialists, this coordination will be a major task. So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists on organization and organizations of specialists on organization. More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand; the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The overall effect of the rise of the industrial system is greatly to reduce the union as a social force. But it will not disappear or become entirely unimportant.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The traveler to the United States will do well, however, 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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

A constant in the history of money is that every remedy is reliably a source of new abuse.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The pioneering instrument of reform was the Bank of England. Of all institutions concerned with economics none has for so long enjoyed such prestige. It is, in all respects, to money as St. Peter's is to Faith.

— 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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In numerous years following the war the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not pay off it's debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Foresight is an imperfect thing — all prevision in economics is imperfect.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

With the American failure came world failure.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics is not an exact science.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge — that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Conscience is better served by a myth.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position, and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

He enlarged perceptibly the scope for debate, liberalized appreciably the intellectual and cultural life of the country and proclaimed the obvious truth that, after an atomic exchange, little would distinguish the Communist ashes from the capitalist ashes.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

War remains the decisive human failure.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being,

— John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the things I argue in my book [A Journey Through Economic Time] is the extent to which people go to avoid rational decisions – the very large role of mental deficiency in economic history. Generally, people have been very resistant to attributing a causal role in history to stupidity.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man... begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble — until the day of disaster.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

— John Kenneth Galbraith

I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less — and probably was much less — than a million.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The Coolidge Bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

To the man who held stock on margin, disaster had only one face and that was falling prices. But now prices were to be allowed to fall. The speculator's only comfort, henceforth, was that his ruin would be accomplished in an orderly and becoming manner.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Our political life favors the extremes of speech; the man who is gifted in the arts of abuse is bound to be a notable, if not always a great figure.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Our political tradition sets great store by the generalized symbol of evil. This is the wrongdoer whose wrongdoing will be taken by the public to be the secret propensity of a whole community or class.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Both of these measures were on the side of increasing spendable income, though unfortunately they were largely without effect. The tax reductions were negligible except in the higher income brackets; businessmen who promised to maintain investment and wages, in accordance with a well-understood convention, considered the promise binding only for the period within which it was not financially disadvantageous to do so.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.

— John Kenneth Galbraith