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I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.

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
Predict
Asked

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We're a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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
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Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
John Kenneth Galbraith