Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

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

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

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.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

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

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

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.

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.

War remains the decisive human failure.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.