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Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

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
Opinion
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Politics
Vacuum
Unduly
Religion
Speeches
Commencement
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Preference
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Must
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More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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
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Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith