Epistemic Ingemination

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NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

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Mon, 01 May 2006

John Kenneth Galbraith passed this weekend at the age of 97. He was a good man who actually left this world a better place than he found it, due to his prodigious intellect and his dedication to the betterment of the human condition. He was a geek, a bon-vivant, an economist, a drinker, a writer, a lover and a fighter, and he was an example of the best that this country can produce. He looked power directly in the eyes and made it blink countless times.

I can't think of a better way to remember him than by repeating his words:

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.

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

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

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.

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

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

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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.

...and, of course, his take on Reaganism and trickle-down economics:

If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.

A life well lived. Safe passage, Sir.

Posted at 10:54 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]