Quote

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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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
Diplomat
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
University Teacher
John K. Galbraith
Life
Affliction
Acceptance
Contentedly
Comfort
Afflict
Comfortable
Verily
Especially
Afflicted
Wrong
Comfortably
Also
Complacency
Even
Happily

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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.
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This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
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A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
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Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
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No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
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If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.
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Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.
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Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
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In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.
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The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
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I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.
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Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.
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Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
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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.
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We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.
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I never enjoyed writing a book more indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
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If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
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