“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“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 (1908-2006)
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“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 (1908-2006)
“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“War remains the decisive human failure.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
"Complexity is a device for evading simple truths"
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)