John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

If all else fails immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront u...

I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single count...

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

War remains the decisive human failure.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and tho...

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small m...

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It i...

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy s...

When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, th...

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his ow...

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grav...

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, th...

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for ...

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been ...

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who ass...

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the ec...

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be see...

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements...

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier ...

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is ...

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than ...

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, ...

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence ...

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery o...

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the...

That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a ...

None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelli...

Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skeptici...

Then the shit hit the fan.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for res...

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding att...

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of...

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, ...

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because th...

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so inter...