Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith

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

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

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.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

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

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

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

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

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.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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