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The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

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
Produce
System
Ability
Fathered
Society
Emphasizes
Values
Consume
Urge
Urges
Value

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Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
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There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
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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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No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
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Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.
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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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All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.
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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.
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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.
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There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
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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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Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
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In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent
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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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If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
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Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
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Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
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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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