Words matter. These are the best John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
War remains the decisive human failure.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
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.
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.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
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.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
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 Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
There’s a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
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 enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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.
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.
The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
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.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
