Daily Inspiration Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith skewers a peculiarly modern survival skill: treating self-correction as a personal threat and rationalization as a full-time job. The line works because it refuses to moralize in the abstract. Instead, it stages a familiar little drama with two doors. One door is small but dignified: change your mind. The other is wide, carpeted, and crowded with paperwork: prove you never had to. Most people, he suggests, choose the second not because they are stupid, but because proof is socially rewarded while revision reads like weakness.

The subtext is about status. In politics, workplaces, even family life, intellectual flexibility often costs face; airtight “proof” buys back authority. Galbraith’s irony is in the word “busy,” which turns defensive argument into a kind of industrious virtue. We don’t merely cling to beliefs; we hustle to launder them into inevitability. The joke bites because it’s true: evidence becomes a tool for protecting identity rather than updating it.

Context matters. Galbraith spent a career puncturing orthodoxies: the idea that markets are naturally self-correcting, that consumer demand is sovereign, that power doesn’t concentrate. He watched institutions - corporations, governments, economists - build elegant models that justified the status quo while reality kept intruding. This quote is his compact diagnosis of why bad ideas persist long after their sell-by date: the cognitive economy favors argument over admission. Changing your mind is a loss; proving you’re right is a profession.