John Maynard Keynes - Ideas Quotes

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It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

John Maynard Keynes
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

John Maynard Keynes
It is not easy for a free community to organise for war. We are not accustomed to listen to experts or prophets. Our strength lies in an ability to improvise. Yet an open mind to untried ideas is also necessary. No-one can say when the end will come. In the war services it is recognised that the best security for an early conclusion is a plan for long endurance.

John Maynard Keynes
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.

John Maynard Keynes
The phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus. Even the idea is not present in a dogmatic form in any of these authors. Adam Smith, of course, was a Free Trader and an opponent of many eighteenth-century restrictions on trade. But his attitude towards the Navigation Acts and the usury laws shows that he was not dogmatic. Even his famous passage about 'the invisible hand' reflects the philosophy which we associate with Paley rather than the economic dogma of laissez-faire.

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 influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

John Maynard Keynes
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

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

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
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