John Kenneth Galbraith

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

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.

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

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

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

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.

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.

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

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.