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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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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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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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?
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Few things are more tempting to a writer than to repeat, admiringly, what he has said before.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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 simplification of our culture.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The Third Way is a purely political concept. The increase in numbers and power of the middle-income groups means that governments choose to meet their needs first. The Third Way is a justification of that necessity.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.
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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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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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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That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.
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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:
people
power
money
men
economics
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times
poor
wrong
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John Maynard Keynes
British Economist
Milton Friedman
American Statistician
Thorstein Veblen
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