John Kenneth Galbraith
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.Collection: Finance
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.Collection: Finance
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.Collection: Wisdom
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.Collection: Politics
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.Collection: Business
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.Collection: Food
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Humor
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.Collection: Money
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.Collection: Government
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.Collection: Faith
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Great
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Politics
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.Collection: Finance
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.Collection: Freedom
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.Collection: Romantic
War remains the decisive human failure.Collection: War
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.Collection: Power
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.Collection: Money
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.Collection: Politics
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.Collection: Alone
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.Collection: Intelligence
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.Collection: Politics
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.Collection: Politics
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.Collection: Wisdom
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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 the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
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.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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.
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
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.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.