Top 100 Keynes's Quotes
#1. So what have Keynes's 'madmen in authority' done with the ideas they inherited from defunct economists? They have set about dismantling the properly economic powers and initiatives of the state.
Tony Judt
#2. The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.
Murray Rothbard
#3. The "virtue" of Keynes's teaching is that it praised thriftlessness, reckless spending, and unbalanced budgets and was therefore extremely palatable to the politicians in power.
Henry Hazlitt
#4. 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
#5. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
John Maynard Keynes
#6. 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
#7. It's not bringing in the new ideas that's so hard; it's getting rid of the old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
#8. 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?
John Maynard Keynes
#9. Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier.
Tony Judt
#10. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
John Maynard Keynes
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.
John Maynard Keynes
#14. 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
#15. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .
John Maynard Keynes
#16. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#17. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#18. 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
#19. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#20. I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
John Maynard Keynes
#21. Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
Neil Gaiman
#22. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#24. The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.
John Maynard Keynes
#25. The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
John Maynard Keynes
#26. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#27. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#28. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
John Maynard Keynes
#29. It's not that I'm particularly shy but I just don't like the idea of publicising myself as a celebrity.
Skandar Keynes
#30. To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat.
James Meade
#31. Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.
Murray Rothbard
#32. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#33. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#34. The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, - but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.
John Maynard Keynes
#35. One's knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.
John Maynard Keynes
#36. There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes.
Joan Robinson
#37. Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
John Maynard Keynes
#38. [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.
John Maynard Keynes
#39. 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?
John Maynard Keynes
#41. 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
#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.
John Maynard Keynes
#44. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#46. If only one person were perfectly informed there could never be a general crisis. But the only perfectly informed person is God, and he does not play the stock market.
Robert Skidelsky
#47. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#48. I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.
John Maynard Keynes
#50. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#51. [People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.
John Maynard Keynes
#52. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#54. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#55. The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
John Maynard Keynes
#56. Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
John Maynard Keynes
#57. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#58. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#59. Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.
John Maynard Keynes
#60. Surely, then, this was a situation that merited the high-minded if somewhat sneering riposte of John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
Kathryn Schulz
#61. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#62. Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.
John Maynard Keynes
#63. Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.
John Maynard Keynes
#64. Neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success.
Terry Pratchett
#65. It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you're found out quickly.
John Maynard Keynes
#66. John Maynard Keynes essentially said, don't try and figure out what the market is doing. Figure out a business you understand, and concentrate.
Warren Buffett
#67. Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." - JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
Tony Judt
#68. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
John Maynard Keynes
#69. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#70. Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
John Maynard Keynes
#71. I really feel that if I did another [Narnia] film I'd just be repeating myself and I don't really want to do that as an actor.
Skandar Keynes
#72. But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.
John Maynard Keynes
#74. 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
#76. Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".
Leonard Woolf
#77. The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
#78. If you put two economists xin a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.
Winston Churchill
#79. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#80. Attempting mischievous and salutary irritation of his peers ... Keynes may only succeed in becoming an academic idol of our worst cranks and charlatans - not to mention the possibilities of the book as the economic bible of a fascist movement.
Henry Calvert Simons
#81. The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.
John Maynard Keynes
#82. The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
John Maynard Keynes
#83. It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
John Maynard Keynes
#84. He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.
John Maynard Keynes
#85. He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it.
Richard Davenport-Hines
#86. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back
John Maynard Keynes
#88. Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
John Maynard Keynes
#90. Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes
#91. If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.
John Maynard Keynes
#92. He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.
Richard Davenport-Hines
#93. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#94. Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.
Ludwig Von Mises
#95. It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.
John Maynard Keynes
#97. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#99. 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.
John Maynard Keynes
#100. Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.
John Maynard Keynes
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