John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

Wherever the dominant culture is, that’s where the money goes.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

…empire follows the balance of property, whether lodged in one, a few, or many hands.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

Influence must ever be in proportion to property; and it is right it should.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

"Freedom" in capitalist countries exists only for those who possess money and who consequently hold power.

The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.

If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.

A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few.

The real alternative to power of the rich is not power of the poor. It's just plain power.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

How that happened - how the money and the power arrayed itself and who got the share in that, who got cut out, who was exploited and who did the exploiting - that to me is a story of The Deuce that's more about almost the America that we inhabit today, more than just merely about pornography or prostitution.

Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

It's the people who work hard and earn big that keep the machine tipping for everybody else. If everybody else was equal down the bottom rung of a ladder, nobody would be on the ladder at all because it would break and everybody would fall off backwards. So you need people at the top to help pull those people up from the bottom. You can't take that and swing to the right. You can't have everybody living in the same ordinary $60,000 house because you may as well live in Russia, Bulgaria or some other Eastern block Communist nation.

Wealth makes the laws that poverty must obey.

Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.

The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.