John Maynard Keynes - Mind Quotes

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Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

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
Courage will be forthcoming if tile leaders of opinion in all parties will summon out of tile fatigue and confusion of war enough lucidity of mind to understand for themselves and to explain to tile public what is required; and then propose a plan conceived in a spirit of social justice, a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice, not as an excuse for postponing desirable reforms, but as an opportunity for moving further than we have moved hitherto towards reducing in equalities.

John Maynard Keynes
The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.

John Maynard Keynes
His [Newton's] peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen through it.

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

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 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
Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion — how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.

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

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