John Kenneth Galbraith Ideas Quotations

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

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

The charge that an idea is radical, impractical, or long- haired is met by showing that a prominent businessman has favored it?an additional tactic in this strategy of defense?is to assert that Winston Churchill once sponsored the particular idea. If one is challenged, a sufficiently careful investigation will show that he did.

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.

Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.

There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.

The ideas by which people . . . interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.