John Kenneth Galbraith

“Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.”

“In economics, the majority is always wrong.”

“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

“None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.”

“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.”

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

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

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

“War remains the decisive human failure.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.”

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

“Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.”

“By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.”

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