John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

The intelligent use of science and technology are the tools with which to achieve a new direction.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Change is a great and horrible thing, and people love it or hate it at the same time. Without change, however, you just don't move.

My new motto is: When you're through changing, you're through.

When you're finished changing, you're finished.

With the way everything's going now and the way that technology is going, you can do a lot of things with a lot of different new materials.

When you are through changing, you are through.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.

The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.

Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.

It's evolve or die, really, you have to evolve, you have to move on otherwise it just becomes stagnant.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

A static hero is a public liability. Progress grows out of motion.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

A society should never become like a pond with stagnant water, without movement. That's the most important thing.

If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different.

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.

Change is not always progress.

You cannot make a living on the past …the stone age did not end because they ran out of stones.