John Kenneth Galbraith

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

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

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

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

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

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

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

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

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.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.