"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"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."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics)."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?"
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"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 the essence of leadership.
"
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"War remains the decisive human failure."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true."
— John Kenneth Galbraith (A Life in Our Times)

"Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil."
— John Kenneth Galbraith (The Great Crash 1929)

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"...the process by which wants are now synthesized is a potential source of economic instability. Production and therewith employment and social security are dependent on an inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation. This may one day falter."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

""The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.""
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale"
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion."
— John Kenneth Galbraith (The Great Crash 1929)

"The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is
not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.
Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood
thing."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Aunque todo lo demás falle, siempre podemos asegurarnos la inmortalidad cometiendo algún error espectacular."
— John Kenneth Galbraith