John Maynard Keynes Quotes
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
It's not bringing in the new ideas that's so hard; it's getting rid of the old ones.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
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.
It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.
One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.
... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.
An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.