Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

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.

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

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

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.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

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

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.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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

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

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

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

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

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

War remains the decisive human failure.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

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