John Maynard Keynes Quotes
-
But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.
-
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.
-
The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, - but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.
-
There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.
-
Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.
-
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
-
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.
-
Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
-
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.
-
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.
-
I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion.
-
Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.
-
By what modus operandi does credit restriction attain this result? In no other way than by the deliberate intensification of unemployment.
-
Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides...
-
I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.
-
I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .
-
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.
-
The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.
-
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.