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Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.

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
Needs
Economic
Invariably
Passion
Solution
Interest
Capitalism
Wish
Reasons
Difficult
Difficulty
Problem
Solutions
Pecuniary
Reason
Ignorance
Inertia
Done
Problems
Confronting

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Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.
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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.
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Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
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A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
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There is an enormous thrust in our time to have a simple answer. And that simple answer is that all depends on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. And Alan, who is an old acquaintance of mine, is a marvelous performer in the impression he gives of enormously great perception.
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Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We're a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.
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Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
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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 point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.
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Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
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More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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I think without a doubt, that what is called financial genius is merely a rising market.
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Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
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[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.
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Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
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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.
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To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
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