John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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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It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
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The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
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I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
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Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
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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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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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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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Chess is a cure for headaches.
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Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
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The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
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Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
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Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.
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Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
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Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
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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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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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The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.
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The duty of 'saving' became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.
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For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.
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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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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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If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.
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But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.