galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, the man who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom" has passed away. today's quotes will all be his.

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

“We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.”

“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.”

“There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.”

“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

“We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."