John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.
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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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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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But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
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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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Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
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THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
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Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.
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Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
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The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.
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In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
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Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
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No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.
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Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
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The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
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Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.
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Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
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There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
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Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?
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The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.