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In numerous years following the war the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not pay off it's debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.

— John Kenneth Galbraith Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975)

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More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.

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

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

A Journey Through Economic Time (1994)

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

The Age of Uncertainty (1977)

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

The Affluent Society (1958)

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Kenneth Galbraith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.