John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

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

Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skepticism in these matters: for practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.

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

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.

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

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

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.

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

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

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.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

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

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

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

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.

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