Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
“One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.”
Interview with John Newark (1990) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004), ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield
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John Kenneth Galbraith 207
American economist and diplomat 1908–2006Related quotes

Excerpts from a speech to the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific, 13 May 2005
Tragedy of the Commons, 1968.
Tragedy of the Commons (1968)

All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)

“Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.”
Ur-Fascism (1995)
Context: Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

“The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.”
Poem in Essays of a Biologist (1923), quoted by Richard Dawkins in A Devil's Chaplain (2003).
Context: The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm—which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.
Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day:
Spirit dissolves the world's material bars—
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.

Around the Cragged Hill : A Personal and Political Philosophy (1994), p. 143
Context: We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world — a monster country, one might say, along with others such as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether "bigness" in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.
The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)