John Maynard Keynes Quotes

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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
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
Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

John Maynard Keynes
In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.

John Maynard Keynes
It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.

John Maynard Keynes
It is difficult to find an intelligible account of the meaning of "probability," or of how we are ever to determine the probability of any particular proposition; and yet treatises on the subject profess to arrive at complicated results of the greatest precision and the most profound practical importance.

John Maynard Keynes
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

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
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
A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.

John Maynard Keynes
For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

John Maynard Keynes