John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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I feel no shame at being found still owning a share when the bottom of the market comes…I would go much further than that. I should say that it is from time to time the duty of a serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself. … An investor…should be aiming primarily at long-period results, and should be solely judged by these.
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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 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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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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By what modus operandi does credit restriction attain this result? In no other way than by the deliberate intensification of unemployment.
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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 economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.
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Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
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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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God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
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I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.
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Silvio Gesell's chiefwork is written in cool and scientific terms, although it is run through by a more passionate and charged devotion to social justice than many think fit for a scholar. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell then from that of Marx.
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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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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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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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All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas - and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.
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It is impossible that the intention of the entrepreneur who has borrowed in order to increase investment can become effective except in substitution for investment by other entrepreneurs which would have occurred otherwise at a faster rate than the public decide to increase their savings...
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The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
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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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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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The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.
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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 numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.