John Kenneth Galbraith's Quotes

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

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

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

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

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

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.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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.

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

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.

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

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

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

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 successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

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

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.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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

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

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.