John Maynard Keynes Quotes

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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 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 behaviour and religion.

John Maynard Keynes
Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians; and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity....You could do anything you like with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones) not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.

John Maynard Keynes
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth -- he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world -- he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.

John Maynard Keynes
If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.

John Maynard Keynes
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

John Maynard Keynes
The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

John Maynard Keynes
Transcending the flux of the sensuous universe, there exists a stable world of pure thought, a divinely ordered world of ideas, accessible to man, free from the mad dance of time, infinite and eternal.

John Maynard Keynes
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
But to argue, without analysis of the instances, from the mere fact that a given event has a frequency of 10 percent in the thousand instances under observation, or even in a million instances, that it is likely to have a frequency near to 1/10 in a further set of observations, is hardly an argument at all.

John Maynard Keynes
Thus those reformers, who look for a remedy by creating artificial carrying-costs for the money through the device of requiring legal-tender currency to be periodically stamped at a prescribed cost in order to retain its quality as money, or in analogous ways, have been on the right track; and the practical value of their proposals deserves consideration.

John Maynard Keynes
The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.

John Maynard Keynes
A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the mass psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield; since there will be no strong roots of conviction to hold it steady.

John Maynard Keynes
I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

John Maynard Keynes
It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary. Moreover, the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society.

John Maynard Keynes
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

John Maynard Keynes
Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel - these are things which should in their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and above all let finance be primarily national.

John Maynard Keynes
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
Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.

John Maynard Keynes
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
Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one's mind and apply all one's powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find what you are surveying is a blank.

John Maynard Keynes
An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

John Maynard Keynes
In a regime of Free Trade and free economic intercourse it would be of little consequence that iron lay on one side of a political frontier, and labor, coal, and blast furnaces on the other. But as it is, men have devised ways to impoverish themselves and one another; and prefer collective animosities to individual happiness.

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