Quotes from 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.

One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.

To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.

Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.

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

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

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.

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

The superior confidence which people repose in the tall man is well merited. Being tall, he is more visible than other men and being more visible, he is much more closely watched. In consequence, his behavior is far better than that of smaller men.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.

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

The leisure class has been replaced by another and much larger class to which work has none of the older connotation of pain, fatigue, or other mental or physical discomfort. We have failed to observe the emergence of this New Class, as it may be simply called.

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

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

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

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