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Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

US (Canadian-born) administrator & economist (1908 - 2006)

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

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.

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.

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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

Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

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

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

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.

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

People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

CP Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

CP Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

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