Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.

Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

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

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

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

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

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

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.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

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.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

A [New Yorker ] is what it has always been. It combines those who pursue the truth with those who pursue the rewards of orthodoxy and those who pursue what is comfortable to the rich.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

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

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.