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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A man who is hungry need never be told of his need for food. If he is inspired by his appetite, he is immune to the influence of Messrs. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. The latter are effective only with those who are so far removed from physical want that they do not already know what they want.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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SOME YEARS, like some poets, and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The enemy of the market is not ideology but the engineer.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A wrong decision isn't forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
Aaron Copland
John Kenneth Galbraith
Creative Commons
Born:
October 15, 1908
Died:
April 29, 2006
(aged 97)
Bio:
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith was a Canadian and, later, American economist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism.
Known for:
The Affluent Society (1958)
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
The New Industrial State (1967)
American Capitalism (1952)
The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004)
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John Maynard Keynes
British Economist
Milton Friedman
American Statistician
Thorstein Veblen
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