Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Waiting
Illusion
Mornings
Term
Wait
Cosmic
Simple
Writers
Lesson
Moments
Lessons
Experienced
Truth
Terms
Touched
Danger
Intimate
Poetry
Total
Wand
Morning
Golden
Wands

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

Image
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
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
Image
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . .
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Writing is a long and lonesome business back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?
John Kenneth Galbraith
Image
Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We're a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.
John Kenneth Galbraith