Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.

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

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.

It is the good fortune of the affluent country that the opportunity cost of economic discussion is low and hence it can afford all kinds.

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

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

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

Happiness does not require an expanding economy

Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

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

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

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

The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.