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Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
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
Valueless
Intrinsically
Desirable
Obviously
Anything
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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
One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
John Kenneth Galbraith
War remains the decisive human failure.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Only men of considerable vanity write books consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
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.
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There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
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The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.
John Kenneth Galbraith
When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.
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