458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.

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

It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.

The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.

World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists.

It is the good fortune of the affluent country that the opportunity cost of economic discussion is low and hence it can afford all kinds.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.