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When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

— John Kenneth Galbraith The Age of Uncertainty (1977)

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Democracy

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

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

A Journey Through Economic Time (1994)

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

The Age of Uncertainty (1977)

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

The Affluent Society (1958)

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Kenneth Galbraith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.