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People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
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
Always
Complete
People
Material
Destruction
Materials
Advantage
Affluence
Risk
Investing
Rather
Surrender
Part
Privilege
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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
Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
John Kenneth Galbraith
If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth Galbraith
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
John Kenneth Galbraith
At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
John Kenneth Galbraith
