The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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.
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
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 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.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
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.
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.
I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
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.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
War remains the decisive human failure.
Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
Then the shit hit the fan.
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled.
In the world of minor lunacy, the behavior of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
Men of conservative temperament have long suspected that one thing leads to another.
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.
Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence to them.
Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.
Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
Galbraith's First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
