Quotes from J. K. Galbraith

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

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

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

Humour 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.

If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.

The more underdeveloped the country the more overdeveloped the women.

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.

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