John Kenneth Galbraith - Wrong Quotes

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A wrong decision isn't forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.

John Kenneth Galbraith
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.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith
But there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In these maters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.

John Kenneth Galbraith
People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary; no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

John Kenneth Galbraith
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

John Kenneth Galbraith
But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

John Kenneth Galbraith
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

John Kenneth Galbraith