John Maynard Keynes

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

— John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

— John Maynard Keynes

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

— John Maynard Keynes

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

— John Maynard Keynes

When, therefore, we enter the realm of State action, everything is to be considered and weighed on its merits. Changes in death duties, income tax, land tenure, licensing, game laws, church establishment, feudal rights, slavery, and so on through all ages, have received the same denunciations from the absolutists of contract, who are the real parents of revolution.

— John Maynard Keynes

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

— John Maynard Keynes

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

— John Maynard Keynes

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.

— John Maynard Keynes

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

— John Maynard Keynes

It is a grand book worthy of one’s hopes of you. A most powerful piece of well organized analysis with high aesthetic qualities, though written more perhaps than you see yourself for the cognoscenti in the temple and not for those at the gate. Anyhow I prefer it for intellectual enjoyment to any recent attempts in this vein.

— John Maynard Keynes

The old saying holds. Owe your banker £1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.

— John Maynard Keynes

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.

— John Maynard Keynes

They offer me neither food nor drink — intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained.

— John Maynard Keynes

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.

— John Maynard Keynes

The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

— John Maynard Keynes

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

— John Maynard Keynes

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.

— John Maynard Keynes

The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.

— John Maynard Keynes

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.

— John Maynard Keynes

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

— John Maynard Keynes

The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.

— John Maynard Keynes

Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.

— John Maynard Keynes

He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.

— John Maynard Keynes

The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.

— John Maynard Keynes

To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party.

— John Maynard Keynes

The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.

— John Maynard Keynes

The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.

— John Maynard Keynes

But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.

— John Maynard Keynes

Men will not always die quietly.

— John Maynard Keynes

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

— John Maynard Keynes

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

— John Maynard Keynes

The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

— John Maynard Keynes

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.

— John Maynard Keynes

Money is only important for what it will procure. Thus a change in the monetary unit, which is uniform in its operation and affects all transactions equally, has no consequences. If, by a change in the established standard of value, a man received and owned twice as much money as he did before in payment for all rights and for all efforts, and if he also paid out twice as much money for all acquisitions and for all satisfactions, he would be wholly unaffected.

— John Maynard Keynes

The best way to cure this mortal disease of individualism must be to provide that there shall never exist any confident expectation either that prices generally are going to fall or that they are going to rise; and also that there shall be no serious risk that a movement, if it does occur, will be a big one. If, unexpectedly and accidentally, a moderate movement were to occur, wealth, though it might be redistributed, would not be diminished thereby.

— John Maynard Keynes

Inflation is unjust and Deflation is inexpedient. Of the two perhaps Deflation is, if we rule out exaggerated inflations such as that of Germany, the worse; because it is worse, in an impoverished world, to provoke unemployment than to disappoint the rentier. But it is not necessary that we should weigh one evil against the other. It is easier to agree that both are evils to be shunned.

— John Maynard Keynes

This state of affairs is not an inevitable consequence of a decreased capacity to produce wealth. I see no reason why, with good management, real wages need be reduced on the average. It is the consequence of a misguided monetary policy.

— John Maynard Keynes

By what modus operandi does credit restriction attain this result? In no other way than by the deliberate intensification of unemployment.

— John Maynard Keynes

Are the solutions offered us always to be too late? Shall we in Great Britain invite three-quarters of the world, including the whole of our Empire, to join with us in evolving a new currency system which shall be stable in terms of commodities? Or would the gold standard countries be interested to learn the terms, which must needs be strict, on which we should be prepared to re-enter the system of a drastically reformed gold standard?

— John Maynard Keynes

Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul — religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient.

— John Maynard Keynes

Comfort and habits let us be ready to forgo, but I am not ready for a creed which does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of daily life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction and international strife. How can I admire a policy which finds a characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every family and group at home, and to stir up trouble abroad?

— John Maynard Keynes

How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?

— John Maynard Keynes

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

— John Maynard Keynes

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

— John Maynard Keynes

I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

— John Maynard Keynes

Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion — how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.

— John Maynard Keynes

For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.

— John Maynard Keynes

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

— John Maynard Keynes

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

— John Maynard Keynes

If Mr. Lloyd George had no good qualities, no charms, no fascinations, he would not be dangerous. If he were not a syren, we need not fear the whirlpools.

— John Maynard Keynes

Ideas shape the course of history.

— John Maynard Keynes

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.

— John Maynard Keynes

The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.

— John Maynard Keynes

Economics is a very dangerous science.

— John Maynard Keynes

Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.

— John Maynard Keynes

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.

— John Maynard Keynes

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.

— John Maynard Keynes

Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

— John Maynard Keynes

The general theory of economic equilibrium was strengthened and made effective as an organon of thought by two powerful subsidiary conceptions — the Margin and Substitution. The notion of the Margin was extended beyond [Utility to describe the equilibrium point in given conditions of any economic factor which can be regarded as capable of small variations about a given value,or in its functional relation to a given value.

— John Maynard Keynes

There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.

— John Maynard Keynes

The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.

— John Maynard Keynes

Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged,

— John Maynard Keynes

I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.

— John Maynard Keynes

His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.

— John Maynard Keynes

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10 000 years ago.

— John Maynard Keynes

It is not easy for a free community to organise for war. We are not accustomed to listen to experts or prophets. Our strength lies in an ability to improvise. Yet an open mind to untried ideas is also necessary. No-one can say when the end will come. In the war services it is recognised that the best security for an early conclusion is a plan for long endurance.

— John Maynard Keynes

Courage will be forthcoming if tile leaders of opinion in all parties will summon out of tile fatigue and confusion of war enough lucidity of mind to understand for themselves and to explain to tile public what is required; and then propose a plan conceived in a spirit of social justice, a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice, not as an excuse for postponing desirable reforms, but as an opportunity for moving further than we have moved hitherto towards reducing in equalities.

— John Maynard Keynes

Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.

— John Maynard Keynes

It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the right outcome for this resultant of many separate policies. It depends on weighing one advantage against another. There is hardly a conceivable decision within the range of the supply services which does not affect it.

— John Maynard Keynes

In peace time, that is to say, the size of the cake depends on the amount of work done. But in war time the size of the cake is fixed. If we work harder, we can fight better. But we must not consume more.

— John Maynard Keynes

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.

— John Maynard Keynes

In order to calculate the size of the cake which will be left for civilian consumption, we have to estimate (1) the maximum current output that we are capable of organising from our resources of men and plant and materials, (2) how fast we can safely draw on our foreign reserves by importing more than we export, (3) how much of all this will be used up by our war effort.

— John Maynard Keynes

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

— John Maynard Keynes

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.

— John Maynard Keynes

The appropriate time for the ultimate release of the deposits will have arrived at the onset of the first post-war slump.

— John Maynard Keynes

The mechanism of reaching equilibrium by means of a rising cost of living, which is vainly pursued by a rising level of wages, will be described in the next chapter. But it is admitted on all hands that this is the worst possible solution.

— John Maynard Keynes

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

— John Maynard Keynes

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

— John Maynard Keynes

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

— John Maynard Keynes

Ideas shape the course of history.

— John Maynard Keynes

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

— John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

— John Maynard Keynes