John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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

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

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.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

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

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

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

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

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.

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.

Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

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

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

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

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

If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.

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

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

The total alteration in underlying circumstances has not been squarely faced, As a result, we are guided, in part, by ideas that are relevant to another world. ... We do many things that are unnecessary, some that are unwise, and a few that are insane

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

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

Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

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 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.

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

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

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

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

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

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.