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You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.

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
State
Organisation
Bigs
Badly
Doe
Department
States
Kindness
Government
Organization
Find
Small
Kind
Politics
Things
Though

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Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
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Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
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Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.
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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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Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
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The spirit should never grow old.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
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The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
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However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.
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Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.
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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
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Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
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The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.
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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.
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The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.
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Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.
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Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.
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There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.
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Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.
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