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The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
Diplomat
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
University Teacher
John K. Galbraith
People
Knowing
Depression
Might
Washington
Done
Lawyer
Great
Assuming
Years
Answer
Superb
Always
Nobody
Economists
Would
Answers
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Maybe
Assume

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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.
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Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
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A [New Yorker ] is what it has always been. It combines those who pursue the truth with those who pursue the rewards of orthodoxy and those who pursue what is comfortable to the rich.
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Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
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More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
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Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
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A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
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I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated.
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Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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