John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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.
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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.
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We will not have any more crashes in our time.
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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 difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
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All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.
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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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If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.
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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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I wish I'd drunk more champagne.
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The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
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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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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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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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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 markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
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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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It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.
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Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.
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In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.
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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.
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Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides...