John Kenneth Galbraith

(109 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(75 votes)   When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(26 votes)   Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(151 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(143 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(132 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(127 votes)   Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(124 votes)   There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(101 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(100 votes)   The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(100 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(98 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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(84 votes)   There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(84 votes)   We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

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(79 votes)   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
1908-, American Economist

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