Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
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
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
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
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
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
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
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
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
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
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
John Kenneth Galbraith