John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
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It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
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Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.
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It is a grand book worthy of one’s hopes of you. A most powerful piece of well organized analysis with high aesthetic qualities, though written more perhaps than you see yourself for the cognoscenti in the temple and not for those at the gate. Anyhow I prefer it for intellectual enjoyment to any recent attempts in this vein.
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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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If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism.
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There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
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For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.
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One's knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.
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Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians; and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity....You could do anything you like with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones) not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.
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For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
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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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Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
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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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The mechanism of reaching equilibrium by means of a rising cost of living, which is vainly pursued by a rising level of wages, will be described in the next chapter. But it is admitted on all hands that this is the worst possible solution.
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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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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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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.
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To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.
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God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
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Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
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There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.
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I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
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All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas - and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.