John Maynard Keynes Quotes

169 Sourced Quotes

Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged,

John Maynard Keynes
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
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
It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.

John Maynard Keynes
Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

John Maynard Keynes
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

John Maynard Keynes
Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.

John Maynard Keynes
Lady Violet Bonham Carter: What do you think happens to Mr. Lloyd George when he is alone in the room?
Maynard Keynes: When he is alone in the room there is nobody there.

John Maynard Keynes
The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.

John Maynard Keynes
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.

John Maynard Keynes
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

John Maynard Keynes
Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
Of Woodrow Wilson

John Maynard Keynes
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally.

John Maynard Keynes
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
The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between a view of the world termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth and that other view, militarist or rather diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture and hereditary or racial prejudice. To the good English radical, the latter is so unreal, so crazy in its combination of futility and evil, that he is often in danger of forgetting or disbelieving its actual existence.

John Maynard Keynes
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
The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

John Maynard Keynes
But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.

John Maynard Keynes
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

John Maynard Keynes
I have now reached a stage in the argument where I have to choose between being too definite or being too vague. If I set forth a concrete proposal in all its particulars, I expose myself to a hundred criticisms on points not essential to the principle of the plan. If I go further in the use of figures for illustration, I am involved more and more in guess-work; and I run the risk of getting the reader bogged in details which may be inaccurate and could certainly be amended without injury to the main fabric. Yet if I restrict myself to generalities, I do not give the reader enough to bite on; and am in fact shirking the issue, since the size, the order of magnitude, of the factors involved is not an irrelevant detail.

John Maynard Keynes
Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.

John Maynard Keynes
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.

John Maynard Keynes
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10 000 years ago.

John Maynard Keynes
The engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit.

John Maynard Keynes
We take it as a fundamental psychological rule of any modern community that, when its real income is increased, it will not increase its consumption by an equal absolute amount.

John Maynard Keynes
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

John Maynard Keynes
The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly here to trends further ahead. But if this is true of the best-informed, the vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgement, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled.

John Maynard Keynes
It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.

John Maynard Keynes
The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

John Maynard Keynes
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