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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
Oratory
Vacuums
Vacuum
Speeches
Fills
Speech
Culture

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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American university presidents are a nervous breed I have never thought well of them as a class.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.
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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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
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A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
John Kenneth Galbraith