Quotes

“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

“We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.” John Kenneth Galbraith

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

“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

“In economics, the majority is always wrong.” 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

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“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.” 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

“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

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

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.” John Kenneth Galbraith

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

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“War remains the decisive human failure.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.” 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

“There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.” John Kenneth Galbraith