Economist and writer JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH was born in Iona Station, Ontario, 1908. He taught economics at Harvard for 30 years, 1945-75, and during that time also served as an advisor to two presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, and wrote his books espousing a liberal outlook toward economics: American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power (1952); The Age of Uncertainty (1977); and The Affluent Society (1958), in which he faulted the conventional wisdom of U.S. economics and called for more emphasis on public services than on production of goods.
*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.
*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.
*Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
*If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
*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 United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
*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.
*Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
*Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
*More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
*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.
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