John Kenneth Galbraith quotes was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century political liberalism. Born: 10/15/1908 Died: 04/29/2006 Country: usa

• 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) [life/comfort]
• 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) [diplomacy/exception]
• The traveler to the United States will do well to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [willpower/english/being/more]
• More die in the United States from too much food that from too little. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [more/food]
• 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) [government/state]
• 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) [time/capital/state]
• The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [government/banks/class/government]
• In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [majority/right]
• 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) [anxiety/people/time/essence]
• 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) [people/being]
• It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [thing]
• There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [majority/truth]
• In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [power//power]
• There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [politics/right]
• Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [politics/art]
• Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [people/customs/harmony]
• Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [money/being]
• Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [achievements/strike/people]
• Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization -- the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [life/men/women/family]
• We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [intellect]
• Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [politics/memory]
• Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied. (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) [money]
• 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) [men]
• By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [age]
• Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [agreeable/interest/action]
• Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [suffering]
• There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [scientists/think/enjoyment/human]
• The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [science/men/knowledge/men]
• The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
• The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. (John Kenneth Galbraith) [wisdom/]

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