John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?
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Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
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The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
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The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
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The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.
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Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?
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I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .
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The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
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When the facts change, I change my mind.
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We will not have any more crashes in our time.
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The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.
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Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
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The general character of our solution must be, therefore, that it withdraws from expenditure a proportion of the increased earnings. This is the only way, apart from shortages of goods or higher prices, by which we can secure a balance between money to be spent and goods to be bought.
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If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.
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If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
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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.
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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.
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The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available,with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation in the United States.
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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.
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Chess is a cure for headaches.
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Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
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The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
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A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.
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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.