John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

More die in the United States from too much food that from too little.

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

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

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

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

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.

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

Politics is not the art of the possible.

It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it.

It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

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

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

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

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.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

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

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

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

The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom.

Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

In economics the majority is always wrong.

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.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

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

War remains the decisive human failure.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

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.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.