John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.

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

This map by cartographer Herman Moll was commissioned by the South Sea Company. The entire region displayed, with the exception of Brazil, was claimed as the company’s trading territory. Disregarded was the fact that Spain claimed the same territory.

Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money

A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is
not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.
Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great — a little understood
thing.

The decisive weakness in neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics is not the error in the assumptions by which it elides the problem of power. The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience. Rather, in eliding power — in making economics a nonpolitical subject — neoclassical theory destroys its relation to the real world. In that world, power is decisive in what happens. And the problems of that world are increasing both in number and in the depth of their social affliction. In consequence, neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics is relegating its players to the social sidelines where they either call no plays or use the wrong ones. To change the metaphor, they manipulate levers to which no machinery is attached.

Le verità lapalissiane dell'economia non hanno verità scopritori; esse sono evidenti a chiunque abbia occhi per vedere.

One of the small but rewarding vocations of a free society is the provision of needed conclusions, properly supported by statistics and moral indignation, for those in a position to pay for them.

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

Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge — that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

The assets back of these notes were, it need hardly be said, minuscule and evanescent. Leverage once again.

A constant in the history of money is that every remedy is reliably a source of new abuse.