John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

When people are educated, class distinction disappears.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

The prince and the peasant will not be equalized by cutting off the prince's head.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

There are servers, and there are people that are served. There's something contradictory about that in a democracy, certainly.

I reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.