Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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