John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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...
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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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He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.
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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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The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.
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In peace time, that is to say, the size of the cake depends on the amount of work done. But in war time the size of the cake is fixed. If we work harder, we can fight better. But we must not consume more.
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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.
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A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
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Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
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...By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract,... governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.
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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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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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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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Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.
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The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, - but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.
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The appropriate time for the ultimate release of the deposits will have arrived at the onset of the first post-war slump.
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If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
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I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
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Thus those reformers, who look for a remedy by creating artificial carrying-costs for the money through the device of requiring legal-tender currency to be periodically stamped at a prescribed cost in order to retain its quality as money, or in analogous ways, have been on the right track; and the practical value of their proposals deserves consideration.
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I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.
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The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.
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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.
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One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.