JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

Humor 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.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

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

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

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.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.