I can't resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school- including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, "would not have been possible without the contribution of these men. " They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They'd all left the country in the 1930s.
Then I was president of the Bakelite Corporation from 1910 to 1930
In 1930 I became a member of the Reichstag.
I would not say that Harvard possesses any sort of absolute dominance. And I personally do not take the rankings of schools all that seriously. However, I think that Harvard's global visibility increased significantly in the 1930s and 1940s and that the new commitment to excellence at Harvard spread to other institutions.
Secretary [Hillary ] Clinton is absolutely right, there are people, Koch brothers among others, who have a group called Concerned Veterans of America, funded by the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers, by the way, want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, every governmental program passed since the 1930s. Yes, there are people out there who want to privatize it.
I collect cars and bikes. One of my most special rides is a black 1930s Cadillac V16, and then I've got a few West Coast choppers.
Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s - the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.
I optioned a book called "Rare Objects" by Kathleen Tessaro and I'm adapting it. It takes place in the 1930s and it's about two women and that's what I'm working on to direct.
I like to imagine, if I was in the 1930s and was rich and a psychopathic killer, I probably would be moving about very freely and having a lot of fun.
Actually, the phrase "national security" is barely used until the 1930s. And there's a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power - Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere - so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for "defense. "
Vaccination programs were instituted in the late 1930s, and the first handful of autistic babies were noted in the early 1940s. When vaccination programs were expanded after the war, the number of autistic children increased greatly.
I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.
It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.
I had two spinster aunts who were seamstresses, and of course unemployed in the 1930s, but the union gave them a life. They had a couple of weeks in the country for a union installation and they had educational programs and all sorts of things. There was a life, you know, a real community.
It is possible that, in fact, Trump's call for "America First" (despite evoking unpleasant recollections that such a phrase was the invention of those in the 1930s harboring fascist sympathies) and a positive relationship with Russia, might lead [to] a more relaxed global setting.
The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.
It's radical Islamic terrorism. And yet, when you see the last eight years, something's gone wrong to call it violent extremism or man-caused disasters. It would be as if we were looking at [Adolf] Hitler in the 1930s. And we were afraid to say that he was a Nazi.
I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.
I would love to do a movie naked; it would be beautiful. No one dares make that kind of film today. They did it in the 1930s in an arty way, so why not now?
The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?