John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.

As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction.

The establishment can't change. It can't give people anything different; it can't make the turn.

I realised how much the system did not want to change.

Just having the economy picking up doesn't mean that we will get through or that we will turn the chapter on many of the problems that we see ahead of us.

My 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' type attitude might have held me back and made me complacent.

You don't want to fix things that aren't broken, so that kind of stops you from make changes.

People are stubborn, and sometimes even if change is good, people will always oppose change.

Because we've always done it that way.' During my 12-year tenure as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, I heard those words all too often. The agency, in my experience, has an entrenched management culture resistant to change.

Any company faces big challenges during transformation. People are accustomed to going ahead on the existing track. Even when they know there are problems, the first reaction is to protect the old way.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Some people never observe anything, Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

There is an enormous inertia that prevents people from change. You must always remember that it is impossible to make something better if you don't make it different - the converse is not true, of course. You cannot make something better unless it is different. And different scares the life out of so many people.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.

In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.

Inertia is comforting, and Americans will be extremely reluctant to make any change that might affect their high standard of living.

I don't have any interest in changing a system, because the system will simply get bucked back by people who haven't changed.

Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change.

Those who don't want to change, let them sleep.

People will suffer almost anything, as long as it means they don't have to change.

The bureaucracies that are in place now, they're not going to change, they're not going to stop.