"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."

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More quotes from: John Kenneth Galbraith

• "A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the ..."
• "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 ..."
• "All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. "
• "Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will. "
• "By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the ..."
• "Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or ..."
• "Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is ..."
• "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 ..."
• "Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them ..."
• "Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in ..."
• "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. "
• "If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the ..."
• "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the ..."
• "In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority ..."
• "In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire ..."
• "In economics, the majority is always wrong. "
• "In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, ..."
• "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than ..."
• "It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or ..."

• "It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. ..."
• "Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so ..."
• "Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then ..."
• "Meetings 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 ..."
• "Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. ..."
• "More die in the United States of too much food than of too little. "
• "Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. "
• "One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not ..."
• "One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen ..."
• "People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so ..."
• "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous ..."
• "Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. "
• "Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear. "
• "Several times I concluded that there was too much detail; always I returned to continue ..."
• "Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality. "
• "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 ..."
• "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, ..."
• "The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering ..."
• "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 ..."
• "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. "
• "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award ..."
• "There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When ..."
• "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 ..."
• "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 ..."
• "Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves ..."
• "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. "
• "War remains the decisive human failure. "
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• "We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography? "
• "Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has ..."
• "Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. "
• "You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does ..."