Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

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

Washington is a place where people praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

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

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.

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

Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.

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

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know.

If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).

The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

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

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

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.

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

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

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

The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.

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

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

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