458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

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

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

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience of the comfortable. There could be a disturbing feeling, however fleeting, of unease, even guilt.

Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.