Google
|
The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
|
| John Kenneth Galbraith
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions. 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. All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum. Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war. By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man. Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay. 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. 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. Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects. If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. 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. In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability. In economics, the majority is always wrong. In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof. In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state. Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down. Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything. Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not. More die in the United States of too much food than of too little. 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. Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied. One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor. The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce. The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware. The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo. The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished. There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth. There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars. Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect. We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much. Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. Where humor is concerned there are no standards – no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon. You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. |
|
Sports Quotations.
Show Business Quotations.
|