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Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
Diplomat
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
University Teacher
John K. Galbraith
Massive
Attack
Conservative
Circumstances
Onslaught
Cannot
Contend
Past
Inherently
Ideas
Circumstance
Yield
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Only men of considerable vanity write books consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
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
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
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There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
John Kenneth Galbraith
No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
John Kenneth Galbraith
War remains the decisive human failure.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
John Kenneth Galbraith
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
John Kenneth Galbraith
