Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

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

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

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

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

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

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

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

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

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

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

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

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

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

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

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

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

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.