Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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

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

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

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.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

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.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

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

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

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

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

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

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

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.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

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

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.

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

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

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

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

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

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

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