Top 15 John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

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.

Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.

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

The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.

"If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics)."

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

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

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

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.