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It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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
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John K. Galbraith
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Government
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More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
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I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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Men will look back in amusement at the pretence that once caused people to refer to General Dynamics and North American Aviation and AT&T as private business.
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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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A wrong decision isn't forever it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever they can never be retrieved.
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In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.
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Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
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Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
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War remains the decisive human failure.
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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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If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.
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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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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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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.
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American university presidents are a nervous breed I have never thought well of them as a class.
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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