John Kenneth Galbraith citáty

page 7

„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.“

“Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”

“It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.”

“There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.”

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”

“But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.”

“The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations… But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.”

“The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.”

“I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.”

“At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.”

“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.”

“By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.”

“Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.”

“It is in the long run that the corporation lives.”

“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?”

“American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.”

“In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.”

“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”

“Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.”

“Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.”

“It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.”

“Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

“If a man be subject to the authority of another, he can at least ask that it not be an occasion for glee.”

“More generally, the individual who gets added income as a result of a general inflationary movement atributes it not to larger economic causes but to his own virtue and diligence.”

“Should there be sacrifice, as always in the mature corporation, it is not suffered by those who agree to it.”

“Nothing so effectively economizes effort and intelligence, as distinct from anxiety, as the knowledge that nothing can be done.”

“We may lay it down as a rule that the older the exercise of any power, the more benign it will appear, and the more recent its assumption, the more unnatural and even dangerous it will seem.”