John Kenneth Galbraith

“By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— 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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“War remains the decisive human failure.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

“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

“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

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith