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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
Later
Dangerous
Public
Wrong
Government
Awkward
Right
Sooner
Always
Suppose
People
Administration
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The notion that you would initiate a new product without preparing the way by persuasion and advertising and salesmanship is fantastic. It's an integral part of the system.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
John Kenneth Galbraith
You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
