John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
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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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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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An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.
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The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
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Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
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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.
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The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.
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Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
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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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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.
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The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.
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If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.
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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.
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The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.
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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...
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In the long run we are all dead.
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The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.
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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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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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To suppose that safety-first consists in having a small gamble in a large number of different companies where I have no information to reach a good judgment, as compared with a substantial stake in a company where one's information is adequate, strikes me as a travesty of investment policy.
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I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.
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It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.
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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.