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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
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John K. Galbraith
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More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.
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If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
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Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
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Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
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Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
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War remains the decisive human failure.
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Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
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A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
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One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
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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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I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.
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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
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Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
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A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
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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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It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
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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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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
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