John Kenneth Galbraith

Quotes

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

2. 

   Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.

3. 

   No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.

4. 

   No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

5. 

   In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading asyndicate that was driving the market down.

6. 

   However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.

   p. 144

7. 

   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.

   p. 165

8. 

   The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.

   p. 111

9. 

   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.

10. 

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

11. 

    Both of these measures were on the side of increasing spendable income, though unfortunately they were largely without effect. The tax reductions were negligible except in the higher income brackets; businessmen who promised to maintain investment and wages, in accordance with a well-understood convention, considered the promise binding only for the period within which it was not financially disadvantageous to do so.

    p. 183

12. 

    The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.

    p. 178