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

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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.
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Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
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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.
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Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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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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Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
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The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.
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Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the nuclear theologians ... Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons ... This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.
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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.
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If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to trickle down economics).
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Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.
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Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
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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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We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
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Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
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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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In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.
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I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.
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The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.
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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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