“The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006)

(From his speech “Wealth and Poverty,” National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty, 13 Dec 1963)

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

— John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)

“You can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or democracy. But you can’t have both.”

— Louis Brandeis (1856—1941)

(Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1916-1939)