John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.

There is nothing reliable to be learned about making money. If there were, study would be intense and everyone with a positive IQ would be rich.

The Reichman brothers, with Robert Campeau the Canadian gift to financial excess, are indubitably broke with depressive effect on the banks that were captured by their euphoric mood.

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

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.

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

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

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

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... &
... Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.

Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.

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

The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities.

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

Then the shit hit the fan.