John Kenneth Galbraith quotes

“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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— 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

“Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.”

— 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 commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?”

— 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

“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

“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

“There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“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.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“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.”

— 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