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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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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
Making
Alcohol
Business
Dull
Doe
Drunk
Toothbrush
Littles
Teeth
Toothbrushes
Little
Clean
Aspirin
Important
Economic
Invented
Much
Less
Goods
People
Pain
Mostly

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Economics is not an exact science.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
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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Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There is an enormous thrust in our time to have a simple answer. And that simple answer is that all depends on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. And Alan, who is an old acquaintance of mine, is a marvelous performer in the impression he gives of enormously great perception.
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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No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to trickle down economics).
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
John Kenneth Galbraith