Quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

War remains the decisive human failure.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

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.

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

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

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

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil’s policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.