John Kenneth Galbraith – 32 Quotes

32 Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

War remains the decisive human failure.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

– John Kenneth Galbraith