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In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
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
World
Troubled
People
Recent
Thoughtful
Poor
Times
Use
Problem
Puzzling
Make
Affluence
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
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We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.
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At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
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Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
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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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Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
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If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.
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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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The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.
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Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
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There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
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Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.
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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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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.
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Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
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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.
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Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
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Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.
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