MondayNov 17, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
People are the common denominator of progress. So ... 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.... But we are coming to realize ... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
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.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
When people are the least sure, they are often the most dogmatic.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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.
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.
Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
Politics is not the art of the posssible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition...
It is easy to overlook the absence of appreciable advance in an industry. Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
The ideas by which people ... interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
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.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
The Affluent Society.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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.
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