The Affluent Society Quotes

“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, The Affluent Society

“Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“In the world of minor lunacy, the behavior of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence to them.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“To proclaim the need for new ideas has served, in some measure, as a substitute for them.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“I would now, however, more strongly emphasize, and especially as to the United States, the inequality in income and that it is getting worse—that the poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasing egregiously. So is the political eloquence and power by which that income is defended. This I did not foresee.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what all have heard before. Again, it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“If the individual's wants are to be urgent, they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all, they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied. For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.

Were it so that a man on arising each morning was assailed by demons which instilled in him a passion sometimes for silk shirts, sometimes for kitchenware, sometimes for chamber pots, and sometimes for orange squash, there would be every reason to applaud the effort to find the goods, however odd, that quenched this flame. But should it be that his passion was the result of his first having cultivated the demons, and should it also be that his effort to allay it stirred the demons to ever greater and greater effort, there would be question as to how rational was his solution. Unless restrained by conventional attitudes, he might wonder if the solution lay with more goods or fewer demons.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“prime threat hovering over a society of general well-being.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn't enough and needs more.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“And in unraveling the complex we should always be careful not to overlook the obvious." John Kenneth Galbraith - The Affluent Society.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society