Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.

I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.

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

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

Although there is much malnutrition in the world, more die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

I feel very angry when I think of brilliant, or even interesting, women whose minds are wasted on a home. Better have an affair. It isn't permanent and you keep your job.

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

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

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being

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.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.

Much of the world's work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.

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

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.