Quote

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

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
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I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.
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Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.
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In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.
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Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
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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.
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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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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
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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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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 businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
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Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
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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.
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There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
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These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence when originality is taken to be a mark of instability and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
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Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
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