Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Thought
Page
Problem
Awful
Back
Pages
Find
Questions
Hover
Writing
Empty
Lonesome
Long
Problems
Shell
Always
Business
Shells
Shows
Composition

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

Image
The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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
Image
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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
Image
In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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
Image
No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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
Image
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