John Kenneth Galbraith citáty

page 2

„Byť bohatým má svoje prednosti; síce sa ľudia dosť často pokúšali dokázať opak tohto tvrdenia, ale nikdy sa to nepodarilo tak naozaj.“

„Čím väčšie je bohatstvo, tým hrubšia je vrstva špiny.“

„Jeden z najlepších kúskov ekonomickej múdrosti je vedieť, čo neviete.“

„Najšťastnejší čas v živote hociktorého človeka je tesne po prvom rozvode.“

„Peniaze sa odlišujú od auta alebo od milenky tým, že sú rovnako dôležité pre tých, ktorí ich majú, aj pre tých, ktorí ich nemajú.“

„Politika nie je umením možného. Spočíva vo voľbe medzi katastrofálnym a nestráviteľným.“

„Reklama je iba plytvanie peniazmi, pretože nevytvára žiadne naozajstné hodnoty.“

„V kapitalizme človek vykorisťuje človeka. V komunizme je to práve naopak.“

„V politike sú časy, keď musíte byť na tej správnej strane a prehrať.“

“Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. 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.”

“Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.”

“But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.”

“Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.”

“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.”

“One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.”

“"Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.”

“The overall effect of the rise of the industrial system is greatly to reduce the union as a social force. But it will not disappear or become entirely unimportant.”

“The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.”

“SOME YEARS, like some poets, and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.”

“Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man… begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”

“A constant in the history of money is that every remedy is reliably a source of new abuse.”

“Economics is not an exact science.”

“The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it becameNew York, London or Tokyo.”

“Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others.”

“The pioneering instrument of reform was the Bank of England. Of all institutions concerned with economics none has for so long enjoyed such prestige. It is, in all respects, to money as St. Peter's is to Faith.”

“A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.”

“Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.”

“With the American failure came world failure.”

“Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.”

“Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.”

“Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for the present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities.”

“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.”

“The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.”

“Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.”

“If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.”