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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble — until the day of disaster.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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To the man who held stock on margin, disaster had only one face and that was falling prices. But now prices were to be allowed to fall. The speculator's only comfort, henceforth, was that his ruin would be accomplished in an orderly and becoming manner.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The Great Wall, I've been told, is the only manmade structure on earth that is visible from the moon. For the life of me I cannot see why anyone would go to the moon to look at it, when, with almost the same difficulty, it can be viewed in China.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economics.
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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Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence. The production reflects the low marginal utility of the goods to society. The income reflects the high total utility of a livelihood to a person.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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It is a commonplace of modern technology that there is a high measure of certainty that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
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)
Most used words:
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John Maynard Keynes
British Economist
Milton Friedman
American Statistician
Thorstein Veblen
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