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Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

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
Courage
Personal
Elaborate
Place
Calculations
Men
Benefit
Washington
Praise
Benefits
Cost

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.
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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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THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
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Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
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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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There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
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One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.
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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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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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Genius is a rising stock market.
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.
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The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.
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Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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The spirit should never grow old.
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No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.
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