458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.

What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

In public administration good sense would seem to require the public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize the eventual disappointment.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.

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 process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

The ideas by which people . . . interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.