John Maynard Keynes Quotes

169 Sourced Quotes

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

John Maynard Keynes
There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.

John Maynard Keynes
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
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
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
We threw good housekeeping to the winds. But we saved ourselves and helped save the world.
Of Britain in the Second World War

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
It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.

John Maynard Keynes
He was the nicest, and the only talented person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg … and Kurt Singer. And he was a Jew; and so was Fuerstenberg. And my dear Melchior is a Jew too. Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains. I vote rather for the plump hausfraus and thick fingered Wandering Birds. But I am not sure that I wouldn't even rather be mixed up with Lloyd George than with the German political Jews.

John Maynard Keynes
He [Woodrow Wilson] could write Notes from Sinai or Olympus; he could remain unapproachable in the White House or even in the Council of Ten and be safe. But if he once stepped down to the intimate equality of the Four, the game was evidently up.

John Maynard Keynes
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.

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
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
It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

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
The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.

John Maynard Keynes
Part of our knowledge we obtain direct; and part by argument. The Theory of Probability is concerned with that part which we obtain by argument, and it treats of the different degrees in which the results so obtained are conclusive or inconclusive.

John Maynard Keynes
To think right - that is no characteristic striving of a class of men. It is a common aspiration. Only, the stuff of thought is mostly intractable, formless, like some milky way waiting to be analysed into distinct star-forms of definite ideas. All thought aspires towards the character and condition of mathematics.

John Maynard Keynes
It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.

John Maynard Keynes
The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.

John Maynard Keynes
If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism.

John Maynard Keynes
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
Others have suggested seriously a "barometer of probability."

John Maynard Keynes
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.

John Maynard Keynes
We know that the probability of a well-established induction is great, but, when we are asked to name its degree, we cannot. Common sense tells us that some inductive arguments are stronger than others, and that some are very strong. But how much stronger or how strong we cannot express.

John Maynard Keynes
Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

John Maynard Keynes
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
Probability is, so far as measurement is concerned, closely analogous to similarity.

John Maynard Keynes
I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx.

John Maynard Keynes