John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

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

Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

In the United States though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

It is impossible in a democratic society to think of a single measure for the improvement of social well-being which is not subject to subversion by ill-conceived minority or even majority pressures.

I have a feeling that at any time about three million Americans can be had for any militant reaction against law, decency, the Constitution, the Supreme Court, compassion and the rule of reason.

Stając przed wyborem czy zmienić zdanie, czy też je udowodnić że nie trzeba tego robić, prawie wszyscy wybierają męczenie się nad linią dowodową.

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

In the United States though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Emancipation of the mind is a no less worthy enterprise than emancipation of the body.

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

Anyone who says he isn't going to resign, four times, definitely will.

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

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

Washington is a place where people praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

People fo privilage will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporations is not an award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm gesture by the individual to himself.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

A modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.