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The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

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
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Always
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There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.
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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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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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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.
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All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
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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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Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.
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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
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Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
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The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
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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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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.
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
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Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
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In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent
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I never enjoyed writing a book more indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
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I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.
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Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
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In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
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