John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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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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 would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
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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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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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In the long run we are all dead.
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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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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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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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God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
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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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Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.
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When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
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The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
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Ideas shape the course of history.
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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 the long-term investor...who will in practice come in for the most criticism... For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional, and rash in the eyes of average opinion...
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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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The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.
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The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
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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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It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary. Moreover, the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society.