John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Conservatives brayed that government should stay out of the private sector; liberals bleated for nationalizing the banks.

I am not someone who tends to advocate for increased government involvement in the private sector.

Either you believe in markets, or you believe in government.

I learned over time that you do not go for the perfect solution….You do what is doable and then you want to try and do a little bit more.

An ideologue believes that what is right will work. A pragmatist believes that what works is right.

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose.

I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

The strongest streak in the American character is a fierce pragmatism that mistrust blind ideology of every stripe and insists on finding what really works.

We need to privatize whenever possible.

I think I'm pragmatic.

Decisions about whether industries or companies should be publicly or privately owned are for the governments of developing countries to make; but where they ask for our assistance we'll give it.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

I believe in anything that works.

His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.

'You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host.

You can do anything you want, as long as it works.

I don't see what difference it makes what side it's [your bread] buttered on. I always eat both sides.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

Why not? That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.

You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning.

We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

If I believe in something, I will fight for it, with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than nothing.

Live in the world you inhabit. Look upon things as they are. Take them as you find them. Make the best of them. Turn them to your advantage.