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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Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.
~ 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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In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
~ 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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By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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