Quotes About Galbraith

cheer the fuck up and eat your burger.

With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.

Psychology's loss," said Strike, "is private detection's gain.

Doesn't anyone ever call you that, among all your many nicknames?' she wondered as they walked back through to the hall. 'Call me what?' '"Lightning" Strike?

his love of privacy extended to a respect for other people's boundaries.

They walked fifty yards in silence, and Strike had lit up a cigarette before he said: "Very, very impressive." Robin glowed with pride.

I was the bloody alternative, standing there, right in front of her!

pack and the pack to her bedside drawer. As she stood and picked up

reasons Tassel was too cowardly to represent

that a fit woman might make the journey on foot

A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door

She'd washed her hands in the bathroom, but they were still damp, because she'd been in such a hurry to get back to Strike.

Fuck, you'd be fantastic. What a fucking ad that would be: I could put you in a tiara. No, but it's funny you should say that, because… Look, it was already in the pipeline, but I'm worried how you're going to take it… It's Charlotte Campbell.

Staring down at his napkin, he resembled a scruffy heron. Tempest,

quid and a bit of an effort … Out of his subconscious rose the names Mazankov and Krupov, and it was a second or two before he remembered

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." He did not consider it a compliment. "We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most

So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true.

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 writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. "But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.

It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.

Humour 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.

The Reichman brothers, with Robert Campeau the Canadian gift to financial excess, are indubitably broke with depressive effect on the banks that were captured by their euphoric mood.