John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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Economics is a very dangerous science.
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I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
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It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the right outcome for this resultant of many separate policies. It depends on weighing one advantage against another. There is hardly a conceivable decision within the range of the supply services which does not affect it.
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By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
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The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
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Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.
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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.
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If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
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Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.
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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
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As quoted in The Economist (13 February 1982), p. 11
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The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
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Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.
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Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.
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The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
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I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.
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If Mr. Lloyd George had no good qualities, no charms, no fascinations, he would not be dangerous. If he were not a syren, we need not fear the whirlpools.
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They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained.
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The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth -- he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world -- he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.
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Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
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Men will not always die quietly.
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This state of affairs is not an inevitable consequence of a decreased capacity to produce wealth. I see no reason why, with good management, real wages need be reduced on the average. It is the consequence of a misguided monetary policy.
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The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
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His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.