Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
¶ Ambassador’s Journal (1969)
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.
¶ London Guardian (28 July 1989)
If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
¶ Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975)
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
¶ Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975)
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
¶ The Affluent Society, Introduction (1977 ed.)
When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
¶ The Age of Uncertainty, ch. 12 (1977)
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.
¶ The Age of Uncertainty, ch. 12 (1977)
When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.
¶ The Great Crash, 1929 (1955)
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
¶ In The Guardian, London (28 Jul 1989)
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable
¶ Letter to Pres. Kennedy (2 Mar. 1962)
