John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

I'm gonna make sure you talk about me, and your grandkids and kids after that gonna know about me...your great grandkids will say "wow, wasn't that a bizarre individual?"

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.

I want to go down in history.

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives.

Oh, you know, your legacy's all you're gonna be remembered by.

I want to be remembered.

I don't care if I am ever remembered in this sport for anything.

I want to go down in the history books with what I've achieved.

Fame or infamy, either one is preferable to being forgotten when you have passed from this realm.

When you are dead, seek for your resting place not in the earth, but in the hearts of men.

I contemplated suicide. My main concern was that I would not make the New York Times obituary page.

The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.

If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

When the dust of death has choked a great man's voice, the common words he said turn oracles, the common thoughts he yoked like horses draw like griffins.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

a man who builds a house never really dies.

Twenty-one already, and I still haven't done a thing worth immortality.

Man's life is short; and therefore an honorable death is his immortality.

The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now, a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.

When people ask me that, I say I don't want to be remembered. It means I'm no longer around.

Evil people you never forget them. And that's the aim of any actress-never to be forgotten.