John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Fact is, famous people say fame stinks because they love it so - like a secret restaurant or holiday island they don't want the hoi polloi to get their grubby paws on.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

I just don't like big guys who speak cryptically and act like they understand the language better than me.

The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who's got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

The meek may inherit the earth, but they don't get in to Harvard.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

Fashion is aristocratic-autocratic.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

The whole idea of hobknobbing and schmoozing and the concept of an "elite" class of celebrities better than the common people has always made my stomach turn.

Life is stranger than fiction. It's nice to have stuff that people don't know about. And it helps when you read a bad review. You can go, "This guy doesn't have me figured out." There's more mystery to you than they understand.

The old boy network is still too strong in Canadian business. A visit to the Toronto clubs at lunch stands in about as great a contrast to the multicultural, multiracial subway underneath as can be humanly imagined. This is not healthy.

I've always said as a political scientist that "culture" is what we use when we can't explain things. I think it's more about accessibility. Part of the problem is that this is an expensive game [golf]. I know in a couple of places where there are black members, and they come from pretty much the same socioeconomic level that the white members come from.

I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

There's only one list that's more illustrious than the list of directors who won the Palme d'Or. It's the list of directors who didn't.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

There's not even real *popularity* at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people.

That there is a secret itself is a secret.

And I'm a Hailsham student - which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.