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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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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
Men
Learned
Refuge
Deficient
Effort
Manifestation
Fortress
Successful
Significant
Intelligible
Interesting
Number
Fortresses
Women
Behinds
Coherent
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Behind
Regularly
Find
Hold
Lively
Make
Numbers
Scholarship
Minimally

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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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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.
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If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
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More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
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If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.
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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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Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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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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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.
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The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
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THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
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In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
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