Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

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

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.

Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?

One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.

Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.

Men will look back in amusement at the pretence that once caused people to refer to General Dynamics and North American Aviation and AT&T as private business.

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.

Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.

That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.

What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.

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

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.

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

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

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.

Some things were never meant to be recycled.