John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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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I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
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Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
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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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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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Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
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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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There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.
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If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
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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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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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There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.
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Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
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But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.
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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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The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.