John Kenneth Galbraith

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

“Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.”

“The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

“Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.”

“You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.”

“There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.”

“We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?”

“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is...”

“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.”

“The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.”

“There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.”

“The 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 conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.”

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

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.”

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”

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

“War remains the decisive human failure.”

“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”