Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Ideas
Circumstance
Yield
Massive
Attack
Conservative
Circumstances
Onslaught
Cannot
Contend
Past
Inherently
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Power is as power does.
John Kenneth Galbraith
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
John Kenneth Galbraith
However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.
John Kenneth Galbraith
One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
John Kenneth Galbraith
These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence when originality is taken to be a mark of instability and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
John Kenneth Galbraith
All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
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
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We talk of the enormous virtues of work, but it turns out that that is mostly for the poor. If you're rich enough or if you're a college professor, the virtue lies in leisure and the use you make of your leisure time.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Conscience is better served by a myth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
John Kenneth Galbraith
