John Kenneth Galbraith

In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.

I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

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.

In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover either for grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much-cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

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

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

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.

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

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

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.