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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
Obviously
Anything
Valueless
Intrinsically
Desirable
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
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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 is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
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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.
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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
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Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.
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Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.
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We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
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What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.
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Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We're a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.
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The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
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But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
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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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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.
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If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
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In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
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There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.
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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
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
The family which takes it mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.
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