458 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

It is not the individual’s right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller’s right to manage the individual.

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.

A wrong decision isn’t forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.

However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less – and probably was much less – than a million.

One man’s consumption becomes his neighbor’s wish.

Happiness does not require an expanding economy.

Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what all have heard before. Again, it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned.

Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.

Speculation, it has been noted, comes when popular imagination settles on something seemingly new in the field of commerce or finance.