John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

The contrast between a figure such as Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire before he was 30, and Alfred Krupp, who spent 60 years building one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, is striking.

Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.

We're seeing a new 'Gilded Age,' where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest.

Inherited wealth, that is not what America is based upon.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

Modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal and at the same time gave it unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

Although capitalism is, in principle, strongly individualistic, it has contributed in practice to reinforce the trend to integration, because it has made our lives more and more interdependent.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

The financial rewards of economic change have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society.

We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only upper classes can afford; the working people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.

Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

Commerce seems to be covering every aspect of our lives now. Which me, because I'm a romantic, is sad for me to say.

While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a matter of hard work.

But if the 1 percent and the 0.1 percent are respected and allowed to risk their wealth - and new rebels are allowed to rise up and challenge them - America will continue to be the land where the last regularly become the first by serving others.

Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.

It's the people who work hard and earn big that keep the machine tipping for everybody else. If everybody else was equal down the bottom rung of a ladder, nobody would be on the ladder at all because it would break and everybody would fall off backwards. So you need people at the top to help pull those people up from the bottom. You can't take that and swing to the right. You can't have everybody living in the same ordinary $60,000 house because you may as well live in Russia, Bulgaria or some other Eastern block Communist nation.

The big lie is that the people who make a lot of money were the only ones that worked hard.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we tend to use technology to show our power: you know, we build high-rises, towers, big buildings that become symbols of power and capitalism. We don't talk about how emotions and nature can be connected.