John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
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Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
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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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Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
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Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
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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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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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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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The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.
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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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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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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 we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.
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Chess is a cure for headaches.
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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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Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.
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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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The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
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Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
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But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.
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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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For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.
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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.