458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being.

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

Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money.

Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.

Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved.

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.

Galbraith’s First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply; things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We’re a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.

I’ve been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.