I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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Power is as power does.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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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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