Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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

When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.

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

I have never understood why ones affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.

Meetings are indispensable when you dont want to do anything.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

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.

War remains the decisive human failure.

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.

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.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, its just the opposite.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of mans oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

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.