A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
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 Quote
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
War remains the decisive human failure.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
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 Quote
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
- John Kenneth Galbraith Quote
