John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

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Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

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
To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party.

John Maynard Keynes
Of Clemenceau:
He felt about France what Pericles felt of Athens—unique value in her, nothing else mattering; but his theory of politics was Bismarck's. He had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.

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

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

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

John Maynard Keynes
The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.

John Maynard Keynes
The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

John Maynard Keynes
The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.

John Maynard Keynes
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.

John Maynard Keynes
The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.

John Maynard Keynes
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man was that age which came to an end in August 1914.

John Maynard Keynes
The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.

John Maynard Keynes
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.

John Maynard Keynes
Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

John Maynard Keynes