John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.

Poverty wants some things, Luxury many things, Avarice all things

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.

Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.

The ability to take advantage of freedom and democracy is proportional to the size of your bank account.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.

It's actually sad to be rich.

I was a millionaire twice over and half again before I was twenty-one. I stole every nickel of it and blew the bulk of the bundle on fine threads, gourmet foods, luxurious lodgings, fantastic foxes, fine wheels, and other sensual goodies.

The truth is that I've always been fascinated with wealth in America. To me, it's been about the American dream and the corruption of that dream.

The evangelicals. . . . If all they want is gold Cadillacs and sex and so on, no big problem.

Riches are apt to betray a man into arrogance.

An excess of hoarded wealth is the death of many.

Today, there are three kinds of people: the haves, the have-nots, and the have-not-paid-for-what-they-haves.

O Luxury! thou curst by Heaven's decree!

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

Riches are not forbidden, but the pride of them is.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

I had the notion that, OK, so now we have all of this wealth, we could buy not only one expensive car, we could buy all of them. As soon as you realize that you could buy all of them, then none of them are particularly interesting or satisfying.

Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle and always want more and more.

I absolutely loathe luxury. It is the one thing I cannot stand.

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

As human beings, we're very materialistic and have all this stuff - furs and cars and diamonds and money.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.