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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to ensure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

War remains the decisive human failure.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

— John Kenneth Galbraith