What to do if you suddenly want to post all possible interesting John Kenneth Galbraith quotes but then immediately realize it’s senseless spamming?
-Well, of course, you spam the only thread you’ve started yourself 
John Kenneth Galbraith - Wikipedia
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
“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 everybody gets busy on the proof.”
“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.”
“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.”
“One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.”
“The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.”
“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”
“Americans had [in 1929] built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.”
“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.”
“Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.”
“Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.”
“In the world of minor lunacy, the behavior of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.”
“In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.”
“The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.”
“Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.”
“Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.”
“The speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.”
“Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.”
“For a decade after the bursting of the debt bubble in 1837, business conditions were depressed in the United States. The number of banks available for financing speculative adventures declined. Then, after another 10 years, public memory faded again.”
“Recurrent speculative insanity and the associated financial deprivation and larger devastation are, i am persuaded, inherent in the system. Perhaps it is better that this be recognized and accepted.”
“Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. - Friedrich Von Schiller, as quoted by Bernard Baruch”
“[…] to pursue the gold deposits that were presumed to exist in the great North American territory of Louisiana. There was no evidence of the gold, but this, as ever in such episodes, was no time for doubters or doubting.”
“Regulation and more orthodox economic knowledge are not what protect the individual and the financial institution when euphoria returns, leading on as it does to wonder at the increase in values and wealth, to the rush to participate that drives up prices, and to the eventual crash and its sullen and painful aftermath. There is protection only in a clear perception of the characteristics common to these flights into what must conservatively be described as mass insanity. Only then is the investor warned and saved.”
“The euphoric episode is protected and sustained by the will of those who are involved, in order to justify the circumstances that are making them rich. And it is equally protected by the will to ignore, exorcise, or condemn those who express doubts.”
“This map by cartographer Herman Moll was commissioned by the South Sea Company. The entire region displayed, with the exception of Brazil, was claimed as the company’s trading territory. Disregarded was the fact that Spain claimed the same territory.”
“There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.”
“… out of the pecuniary and political pressures and fashions of the time, economics and larger economic and political systems cultivate their own version of the truth. This last has no relation to reality. No one is especially at fault; what is convenient to believe is greatly preferred.”
“Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people—the degrading lust of gain…or the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors.”
"[…]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.”
“When a mood of excitement pervades a market or surrounds an investment prospect, when there is a claim of unique opportunity based on special foresight, all sensible people should circle the wagons; it is the time for caution.”
“In all speculative episodes there is always an element of pride in discovering what is seemingly new and greatly rewarding in the way of financial instrument or investment opportunity. The individual or institution that does so is thought to be wonderfully ahead of the mob.”
“There would also be, we may be certain, the traditional reassuring words from Washington. Always when markets are in trouble, the phrases are the same: “The economic situation is fundamentally sound” or simply “The fundamentals are good.” All who hear these words should know that something is wrong.”
“Andrew W. Mellon said, “There is no cause for worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue.” Mr. Mellon did not know. Neither did any of the other public figures who then, as since, made similar statements. These are not forecasts; it is not to be supposed that the men who make them are privileged to look farther into the future than the rest. Mr. Mellon was participating in a ritual which, in our society, is thought to be of great value for influencing the course of the business cycle. By affirming solemnly that prosperity will continue, it is believed, one can help insure that prosperity will in fact continue.”
“Out of that belief, thus instilled, then comes action—the bidding up of values, whether in land, securities, or, as recently, art. The upward movement confirms the commitment to personal and group wisdom. And so on to the moment of mass disillusion and the crash. This last, it will now be sufficiently evident, never comes gently. It is always accompanied by a desperate and largely unsuccessful effort to get out.”“But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future.”
“The recurrent and sadly erroneous belief that effortless enrichment is an entitlement associated with what is thought to be exceptional financial perspicacity and wisdom is not something that yields to legislative remedy.”
“The consequences of successful action seemed almost as terrible as the consequences of inaction, and they could be more horrible for those who took the action. A bubble can easily be punctured. But to incise it with a needle so that it subsides gradually is a task of no small delicacy.”
“It is possible to see here again the constants in these matters. Associated with the wealth of the Banque Royale, Law was a genius—intelligence, as ever, derived from association with money. When the wealth dissolved and disappeared, he was a fugitive mercilessly reviled.”
“In economics, the majority is always wrong.”
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
So I’ll put one calculation here before others hopefully get excited.
