The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Author
John Kenneth Galbraith
40 quotations
About John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith, also known as J. K. Galbraith or Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. He served as the deputy director of the powerful Office of Price Administration (OPA) during World War II in charge of stabilizing all prices, wages and rents in the Amer…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by John Kenneth GalbraithOne of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
War remains the decisive human failure.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
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 essen…
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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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 th…
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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.
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.
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
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.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
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 essen…
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
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.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
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 essen…