John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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War remains the decisive human failure.
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The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.
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However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.
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Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
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The traveler to the United States will do well, however, to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
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All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.
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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
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We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
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The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
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Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
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Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
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Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.
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Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.
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Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.