John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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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It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
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The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.
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Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
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Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.
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Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.
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It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
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If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.
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The duty of 'saving' became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.
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When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
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Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
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Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold standard.
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There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.
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Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
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The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.
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God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
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For each individual it is a great advantage to retain the rights over the fruits of his labour even though he must put off the enjoyment of them. His personal wealth is thus increased. For that is what wealth is,-command of the right to postponed consumption.
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I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.
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It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.
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Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
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Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters currency debasement than they are now.
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The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
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Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
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If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.