Daily Inspiration Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith’s line lands like a genteel shiv: it praises “truth,” but it’s really taking a swing at the smugness of majorities. The phrase “wrong-headed majority” is doing double duty. It concedes the brute fact of democracy and public opinion while insisting that numbers can be a cover for intellectual laziness, herd comfort, or self-interest dressed up as consensus. “Assailed” matters, too. Truth doesn’t merely persuade here; it attacks. Galbraith imagines reality as something with teeth, capable of puncturing the padded armor of popular belief.

The intent is partly moral and partly theatrical. He’s describing the private pleasure of watching confidence get corrected. That “something wonderful” is a confession of relish: the satisfaction of seeing a dominant story lose its grip when confronted by facts it can’t absorb. Subtext: the majority often wins by default, not by merit, and it takes an aggressive, even impolite insistence on evidence to dislodge it.

Contextually, it reads like a capsule of mid-20th-century liberal technocratic impatience. Galbraith spent a career critiquing complacent orthodoxies in economics and politics: the sanctification of markets, the underestimation of corporate power, the belief that prosperity automatically equals progress. In that world, “truth” isn’t a tidy theorem; it’s an unwelcome audit. The quote flatters dissenters, but it also warns them: if truth must “assail” the majority, the majority is not merely mistaken - it is defended, invested, and organized against correction.