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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

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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
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More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
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The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive (Free Market Fraud, January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.
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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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There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . .
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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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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.
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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
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No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.
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Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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
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I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.
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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
John Kenneth Galbraith