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In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
Diplomat
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
University Teacher
John K. Galbraith
Made
Luxuries
Affluent
Necessities
Distinction
Luxury
Useful
Wealth
Society

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If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
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In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
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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.
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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
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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.
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Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
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Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.
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For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.
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A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
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Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.
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The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
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I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
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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.
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The family which takes it 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.
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Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.
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I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.
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It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.
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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.
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