John Maynard Keynes Quotes
-
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
-
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.
-
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
-
Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
-
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.
-
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas - and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.
-
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
-
But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.
-
Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.
-
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.
-
Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
-
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.
-
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
-
Ideas shape the course of history.
-
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.
-
Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
-
There was an attraction at first that Mr Baldwin should not be clever. But when he forever sentimentalises about his own stupidity, the charm is broken.
-
But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.
-
I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.
-
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
-
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
-
Nothing can preserve the integrity of contact between individuals, except a discretionary authority in the state to revise what has become intolerable. The powers of uninterrupted usury are too great. If the accretions of vested interests were to grow without mitigation for many generations, half the population would be no better than slaves to the other half.
-
I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
-
The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.