John Maynard Keynes
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
John Maynard Keynes
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
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
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
John Maynard Keynes
The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
John Maynard Keynes
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
John Maynard Keynes
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
John Maynard Keynes
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.
John Maynard Keynes
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
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
John Maynard Keynes
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
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
I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
John Maynard Keynes
Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
John Maynard Keynes
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
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
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
John Maynard Keynes
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.
John Maynard Keynes
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
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes
When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
John Maynard Keynes
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes
In the long run, we are all dead!
John Maynard Keynes
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
John Maynard Keynes
So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against (Einstein). He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump… How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing?
John Maynard Keynes
How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.
John Maynard Keynes
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
John Maynard Keynes
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
I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railroad or organise a Trust or at least swindle the investing public.
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
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
