John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul - religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient.
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There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
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By this means fractional reserve banking government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.
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Galton's eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.
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It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.
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Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
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Should government refrain from regulation taxation, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.
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The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.
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In the long run we are all dead.
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How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?
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Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case...
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It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.
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Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.
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When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues.
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He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.
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How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?
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So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against Einstein. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing?
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It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.
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Ideas shape the course of history.
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Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget.
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What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!
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Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
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This siren, this goat-footed bard, this half human visitor to our age the hag-ridden and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity. One catches in his company that flavour of final purposelessness, inner responsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power.
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The love of money as a possession-as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi – criminal, semi – pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease...