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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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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
Right
Sooner
Always
Suppose
Administration
People
Later
Dangerous
Public
Wrong
Government
Awkward
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We talk of the enormous virtues of work, but it turns out that that is mostly for the poor. If you're rich enough or if you're a college professor, the virtue lies in leisure and the use you make of your leisure time.
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The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
John Kenneth Galbraith
A [New Yorker ] is what it has always been. It combines those who pursue the truth with those who pursue the rewards of orthodoxy and those who pursue what is comfortable to the rich.
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 experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
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It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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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
In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
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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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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.
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In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful. The press was busy printing money.
John Kenneth Galbraith
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
John Kenneth Galbraith
