John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people.

While all too many people live in dire poverty, others are caught up in materialism and lifestyles which are destructive of family life and the most basic demands of Christian morality.

I feel terrible about corporate greed. Growing up in a household that was a little more humble and didn't put so much emphasis on money and material goods, I think I have a pretty good head on my shoulders.

Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet would cost about $20 billion. Let's just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.

Don't accumulate if you do not need. The excess of wealth in your hands is for the society, and you are the trustee for the same.

Rappers have traditionally put products in songs, and it's been products that don't put anything back into our community.

Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.

While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.

I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.

God does not create poverty; we do, because we do not share.

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

Bush senior used to say that we have more will than wallet. So he urged the country to attack poverty with a thousand points of light, none of which could be eaten.

The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.

First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

The American people have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems.

I like to help poor people who got no chance. If rich people don't, who will? Not other poor people, that's for sure.

They Have Money For War But Can't Feed The Poor.

The world does not lack the financial resources to feed, educate and clothe its inhabitants. Rather, it lacks leaders committed to addressing the problems of the impoverished.

There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be.

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

I don't believe in sharing my money. If I go out and work my nuts off and make some money, I don't feel that I should have to share it with my community.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich