John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Meetings 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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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
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That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.
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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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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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Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
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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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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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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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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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It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
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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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Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
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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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No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.
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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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Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
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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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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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A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
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Conscience is better served by a myth.