The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
John Kenneth Galbraith

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.
John Kenneth Galbraith

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

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
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

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

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

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
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.
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

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
John Kenneth Galbraith

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
John Kenneth Galbraith

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