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All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.

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
Waiting
Illusion
Mornings
Term
Wait
Cosmic
Simple
Writers
Lesson
Moments
Lessons
Experienced
Truth
Terms
Touched
Danger
Intimate
Poetry
Total
Wand
Morning
Golden
Wands

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The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
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Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.
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It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
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Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . 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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Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
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All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
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Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.
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I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
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In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
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A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.
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We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
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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.
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The spirit should never grow old.
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There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
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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.
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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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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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