John Kenneth Galbraith

“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”

— 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

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.”

— 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

“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

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“War remains the decisive human failure.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— 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

“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

“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

“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

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

— 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