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Men will look back in amusement at the pretence that once caused people to refer to General Dynamics and North American Aviation and AT&T as private business.

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
People
Private
Pretence
General
Dynamics
American
Refer
Business
Amusement
Back
Aviation
Look
Caused
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North
Men
Economics

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If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
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Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.
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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.
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The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.
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The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.
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Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
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We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
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I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive (Free Market Fraud, January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.
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You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
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There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
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Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.
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There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.
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Writing is a long and lonesome business back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?
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Power is as power does.
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One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
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A wrong decision isn't forever it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever they can never be retrieved.
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The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.
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The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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