A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
John Kenneth GalbraithIn all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth GalbraithCapitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.
John Kenneth GalbraithLiberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
John Kenneth Galbraith