WIST

The tendency of bureaucracy [is] to find purpose in whatever it is doing.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“Foreign Policy: The Plain Lessons of a Bad Decade,” Foreign Policy (Dec 1970)

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes — indeed, deletes — the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“Free Market Fraud”, The Progressive (Jan 1999)

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

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“H.L. Mencken,” The Washington Post (14 Sep 1980)

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“Recession Economics,” New York Review of Books (4 Feb 1982)

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 an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“Stop the Madness,” Interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail (6 Jul 2002)
The above citation is no longer online. A number of books cite this as a 2002 utterance, but the quote can be found in Peter Lawrence, Peter's Quotations (1993).

In Max Perultz, I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier (1998), he quotes a variant:  "The modern conservative is in fact, not especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest pursuits, best financed and most applauded and, on the whole least successful exercises in moral philosophy. This is the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness."

There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy, but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“The American Ambassador,” Foreign Service Journal (Jun 1969)

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“The American Economy: Its Substance and Myth” (1949)

There is something uniquely obscene about competition to promote weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of improving the stock market position of a corporation.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
“The Big Defense Firms are Really Public Firms and Should Be Nationalized,” The New York Times Magazine (16 Nov 1969)

It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
(Attributed)

Who’d have thought we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
(Attributed, 1946)
On seeing the line-up of Nazi war criminals accused at Nuremburg. In Alex Ross, "Watching for a Judgment of Real Evil," New York Times (12 Nov 1995)

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary; no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
A Life in Our Times, ch. 11 (1981)

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

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
A Life in Our Times, ch. 22 (1981)
Variant: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. And under Communism it is just the reverse." Galbraith refers to it as an old Polish joke.

Television newsmen are breathless on how the game is being played, largely silent on what the game is all about.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
A Life in Our Times, ch. 3 (1981)

Then the shit hit the fan.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
Ambassador’s Journal (1969)
Galbraith claims to have coined this phrase (see A Life In Our Times (1981))

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
Annals of an Abiding Liberal (1979)

The salary of the chief executive of the 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 (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
Annals of an Abiding Liberal, ch. 6 (1979)

People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, 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. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
Economic Development (1964)

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
Economics, Peace and Laughter (1971)
(also called "Galbraith's Law")

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

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, ch. 13 “The Self Inflicted Wounds” (1975)
Sometimes misquoted as "... by spectacular error".

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
New York Times Magazine (7 Jun 1970)

Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Affluent Society, ch. 1, sec. 1 (1958)

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

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Affluent Society, ch. 11, sec. 4 (1958)

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Affluent Society, ch. 2, sec. 4 (1958)

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Affluent Society, ch. 2, sec. 6 (1958)

“Poverty,” Pitt exclaimed, “is no disgrace but it is damned annoying.” In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Affluent Society, ch. 23, sec. 6 (1958)

Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Affluent Society, ch. 25, sec. 3 (1958)

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.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Age of Uncertainty, ch. 12 (1977)

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Age of Uncertainty, ch. 12 (1977)

Do not be alarmed by simplification; complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Age of Uncertainty (BBC TV) (1977)

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

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Age of Uncertainty, ch. 3 “The Massive Dissent of Karl Marx” (1977)