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John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006] American

Rank: 101
Economist

John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, OC was a Canadian economist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism.

Politics, Finance, Intelligence, Wisdom, Art, Business, Failure, Food, Great, Humor, Leadership, Money, Nature, Power, Romantic, Time, War, Work

Quote	Tags	Rank
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.	Art, Politics	101
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.	Work	102
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.	Food	103
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.	Politics	104
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.		105
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.		106
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.		107
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.	Humor	108
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.	Business	109
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.	Great, Leadership, Time	110
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.	Money	111
War remains the decisive human failure.	Failure, War	112
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.		113
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.	Power	114
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.	Nature	115
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.		116
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.		117
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.		118
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.		119
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.	Finance, Intelligence	120
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.		121
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.	Intelligence	122
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.	Finance	123
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.		124
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.	Politics	125
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.	Politics	126
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.		201
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.	Finance	202
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.		203
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.	Politics	204
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.		205
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.		206
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.	Wisdom	207
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.		208
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.		209
In economics, the majority is always wrong.		210
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.		211
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.		212
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.		213
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.		214
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.		215
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.		216
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.		217
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.		218
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.		219
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.		220
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.		221
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.		222
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.		223
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.		224
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.		225
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.	Romantic	226
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.		301
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.		302
The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.		303
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?		304
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.	Wisdom	305
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.		306
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.		307
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.		308

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