Quotation:
"The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not."
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. "
- "Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either ..."
- "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 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. "
- "We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not ..."
- "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 ..."


