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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.
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
Fear
Seeming
Even
Mentally
Merit
Questions
Afraid
Asks
Legislator
Simple
Retarded
Everyone
Legislators
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
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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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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.
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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.
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Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
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In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.
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It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
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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.
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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.
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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 the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
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The spirit should never grow old.
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The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.
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If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.
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Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.
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In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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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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