John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

John Kenneth Galbraith, also known as J. K. Galbraith or Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. He served as the deputy director of the powerful Office of Price Administration (OPA) during World War II in charge of stabilizing all prices, wages and rents in the American economy, to combat the threat of inflation and hoarding during a time of shortages and rationing, a task which was successfully accomplished.

Quotes

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

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

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

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

Immortality, Mistakes
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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.
People are the common denominator of progress. So... 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.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
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 a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

Memory, Politics
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Politics
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.

Humor