John Maynard Keynes quotes

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Government #Important #Citizens

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Inspirational #Change #Lying

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

#Peace #Men #Benefits

Ideas shape the course of history.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Inspirational #Life Changing #Carpe Diem

When the facts change, I change my mind.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Business #Mind #Facts

Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Doubt #Spread

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Believe #Men #Voice

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Information #Conclusion

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Long #Gains #Bears

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Succeed #Reputation #Failing

In the long run we are all dead.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Funny #Death #Running

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Business #Fun #Men

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Investing #Irrational

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Justice #Political #Liberty

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Country #Jobs #Done

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Real #Community #Principles

The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Business #Slumps #Found

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Eye #Science #Years

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Gold #Standards #Relics

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Thinking #Hands #Years

The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Long #Evil #Mind

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Government #Important #Done

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#People #Clerks #Students

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Ties #Errors #Ideas

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Income #Employment #Arbitrary

Chess is a cure for headaches.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Chess #Headache #Cures

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Past #Men #Conservative

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Ideas #Evil #Dangerous

This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Running #Ocean #Past

The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Country #Eugenics #Numbers

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Prudent #Finals #Compromise

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Money #Business #Future

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Mean #Men #Law

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Ignorance #Dark #Skills

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Inspirational #Business #Past

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Country #Jobs #Done

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Wise #Successful #Investing

Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Government #Taxation #Regulation

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Running #Long #Affair

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Humble #People #Levels

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Funny #Business #Intellectual

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Insightful

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Sometimes #Found #Harm

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Real #Heart #Religion

We will not have any more crashes in our time.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Great Depression #Crash

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Banking #Pounds #Problem

If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Wise #Morning #Rain

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
-- John Maynard Keynes

#Education #Lying #Escaping