Quotes By John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

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

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

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

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

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.

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

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

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?