Top 100 John Maynard Keynes Quotes
#1. 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?
#2. Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
#3. It is Enterprise which build and improves the world's possessions ... If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing.
#4. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
#5. By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.
#6. Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.
#7. The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.
#8. To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.
#9. The treasury could fill old bottles with banknotes and bury them..and leave it to private enterprises on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.
#10. The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
#11. By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract, ... governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.
#12. Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.
#13. If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.
#14. Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.
#15. Saving became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth
#16. It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.
#17. 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.
#18. Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
#19. The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
#20. Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
#21. The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.
#22. 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.
#23. The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
#24. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
#25. I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
#26. 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.
#27. I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
#28. I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.
#29. The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.
#30. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .
#31. Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.
#32. 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.
#33. 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.
#34. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
#35. How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?
#36. It's not bringing in the new ideas that's so hard; it's getting rid of the old ones.
#37. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .
#38. 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.
#39. If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.
#40. I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.
#41. Canada is a place of infinite promise. We like the people, and if one ever had to emigrate, this would be the destination, not the U.S.A. The hills, lakes and forests make it a place of peace and repose of the mind, such as one never finds in the U.S.A.
#42. It is a mistake to think that one limits one's risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.
#43. The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.
#44. If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
#45. I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.
#46. It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
#47. It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
#48. In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.
#49. 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?
#50. [Silvio] Gesell's chiefwork is written in cool and scientific terms, although it is run through by a more passionate and charged devotion to social justice than many think fit for a scholar. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell then from that of Marx.
#51. It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
#52. I wish I'd drunk more champagne.
#53. We will not have any more crashes in our time.
#54. Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.
#55. The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.
#56. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
#57. Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
#58. I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
#59. If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.
#60. God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
#61. 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.
#62. I can't remember my telephone number, but I know it was in the high numbers.
#63. Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
#64. But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future .
#65. The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
#66. Economics is a very dangerous science.
#67. It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.
#68. The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, - but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.
#69. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done
#70. Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
#71. The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
#72. There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.
#73. 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.
#74. 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 civilization which we have already attained.
#75. The love of money as a possession ... will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.
#76. To suppose that safety-first consists in having a small gamble in a large number of different companies where I have no information to reach a good judgment, as compared with a substantial stake in a company where one's information is adequate, strikes me as a travesty of investment policy.
#77. Galton's eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.
#78. The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
#79. The Economic Problem ... the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.
#80. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
#81. When the facts change, I change my mind
#82. 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.
#83. The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.
#84. If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
#85. It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.
#86. Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.
#87. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
#88. If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
#89. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
#90. The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
#91. It is impossible that the intention of the entrepreneur who has borrowed in order to increase investment can become effective (except in substitution for investment by other entrepreneurs which would have occurred otherwise) at a faster rate than the public decide to increase their savings
#92. Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides
#93. 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 behavior and religion.
#94. It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
#95. Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.
#96. Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case
#97. Chess is a cure for headaches.
#98. The principle objectives in life are love, the creation and enjoyment if aesthetic experience, the pursuit of knowledge. Love comes a long way first.
#99. 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.
#100. Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold (or, formerly, silver) standard.
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