One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote criticizes the common perception of economics as dull, and acknowledges that the audience's disengagement is understandable.
John Kenneth Galbraith reflects on the challenges of engaging an American audience with economics, suggesting that the subject often falls victim to clichés and is perceived as tedious. He observes that people's tendency to tune out discussions on economics is not without reason, highlighting the disconnect between the subject matter and the audience's interest.
Themes
EconomicsBoredomAudienceClicheEngagementSubjectDisconnect
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the importance of engaging with economic issues, one might reference this quote to highlight audience apathy.
More from John Kenneth Galbraith
All quotes →If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
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.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
Similar quotes
When I see kids standing next to their mothers at book signings, clutching a copy of 'Forever,' I know what's coming. They'll say to me, 'How old do I have to be to read this?' hoping I'll give them permission. But I can't do that.
Judy BlumeRead
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
Graham GreeneRead
A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.
Richard WhatelyRead
It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
John GreenRead
Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
Anna QuindlenRead
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
Johann Gottlieb FichteRead