Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

Power is as power does.

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.

I talked about the consolidation of power in the hands of the corporate bureaucracy, as distinct from the stockholders. To this view, I still strongly adhere.

The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.

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

If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.

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

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

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

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

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.

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.

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

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.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

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

The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.

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