John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.

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

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.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

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

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

Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist.

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

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

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.

The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.