Keynes Quotes

Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing ... ~ Barry Ritholtz

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

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one. ~ John Maynard Keynes

I can't remember my telephone number, but I know it was in the high numbers. ~ John Maynard Keynes

But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do? ~ John Maynard Keynes

So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against (Einstein). He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump ... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing? ~ John Maynard Keynes

Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed. ~ John Maynard Keynes

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. ~ John Maynard Keynes

There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world. ~ 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

Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine of that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of 'liquid' securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

The insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men ... ~ John Maynard Keynes

Jowell fell back on the same justification for funding the arts that the first chairman of the Arts Council, John Maynard Keynes, had deployed in 1945. Art was something produced by people with special skills, who set their own standards of excellence; they needed to be supported to do this, and the audience needed to be encouraged to appreciate this excellence, by being given subsidised access to it. And for all of Jowell's attempts to transcend instrumentalism, the purpose of culture continued to be to help the government 'to transform our society into a place of justice, talent and ambition where individuals can fulfil their true potential'.22 ~ Robert Hewison

The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available,with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation in the United States. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. ~ Tony Judt

The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant
that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them. ~ Paul Krugman

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged ~ John Maynard Keynes

It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of out foreign exchange, was being spent on the war ... I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." ... Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions. ~ Freeman Dyson

The idea behind stamped money is sound. ~ John Maynard Keynes

[Silvio] Gesell's chiefwork is written in cool and scientific terms, although it is run through by a more passionate and charged devotion to social justice than many think fit for a scholar. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell then from that of Marx. ~ John Maynard Keynes

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out. ~ John Maynard Keynes

One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli. ~ John Maynard Keynes

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity. ~ John Maynard Keynes

A speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware. ~ John Maynard Keynes

I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes ~ George Soros

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

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 influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. ~ John Maynard Keynes

[People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives. ~ 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 behavior and religion. ~ John Maynard Keynes

I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles. ~ John Maynard Keynes

I feel no shame at being found still owning a share when the bottom of the market comes ... I would go much further than that. I should say that it is from time to time the duty of a serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself. ... An investor ... should be aiming primarily at long-period results, and should be solely judged by these. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now. ~ John Maynard Keynes

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing. ~ John Maynard Keynes

It's a bittersweet feeling because this [filming in Chronicles of Narnia] has been a part of my life for six years - from the age of 15 to 21. For anybody that's a big growing up phase, especially in the unique experience of Narnia. But I feel honoured to have been a part of it but the tools I learned from Narnia I'm now taking forward to my next project. ~ Skandar Keynes

The idea of confidence, of the emotions of the population, is an incredibly important one in economics. John Maynard Keynes called it 'animal spirit.' And if people are feeling generally good about the future, they're more likely to spend money, to start new companies; companies are more likely to hire people, make investments. ~ Adam Davidson

Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science. ~ Murray Rothbard

My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as material for the purpose … How could either of these books carry fire and sword round half the world? It beats me. [writing to George Bernard Shaw] ~ John Maynard Keynes

In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where nations go to die - not in Keynes' 'long run,' but sooner than you think. ~ Mark Steyn

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

I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated
introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished
experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a
boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments, These were essential accomplishments, part of his
unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries.
His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had
seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and
most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. 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 that what
you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and
weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it
up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary
- 'so happy in his conjectures', said De Morgan, 'as ~ John Maynard Keynes

It is a mistake to think that one limits one's risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence. ~ John Maynard Keynes

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Ither immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light. ~ Henry Hazlitt

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning. ~ Richard Davenport-Hines

Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times. ~ Thomas J. Sargent

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? ~ John Maynard Keynes

We will not have any more crashes in our time. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. ~ John Maynard Keynes

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has. ~ 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

When it's all over I won't miss the bruises he gave me to impress girls, or the occasional scar which will give me a story to tell my grandchildren, but I'll definitely miss the pranks and the laughing and all the making fun of each other. I'll miss the funky advice he gives me about everything
football, girls, video games, clothes. Most of all, I'll miss having an older brother. ~ Skandar 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

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. ~ Tony Judt

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

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. ~ 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

Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides ~ John Maynard Keynes

To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat. ~ James Meade

If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy. ~ 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

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back ~ John Maynard Keynes

Chess is a cure for headaches. ~ John Maynard Keynes

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud. ~ Benito Mussolini

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

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. ~ John Maynard Keynes

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

Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." - JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES ~ Tony Judt

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

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the 'financial' burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment. We have to accept them as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to 'enrich' an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner) were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. Woolf's aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, (male) Bloomsbury's dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of G. E. Moore (a central influence on the Apostles), and culminating in Fry's and Clive Bell's differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. 'The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,' Leonard Woolf recalls, 'were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.'
Increasing awareness of Woolf's feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching Woolf's work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged. ~ Jane Goldman

For centuries, economic thinkers, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, have tried to identify the elusive formula that makes some countries more prosperous and successful than others. My curiosity about this topic spurred me, as a young professor of economics in the late 1970s, to research new ways of measuring national competitiveness. ~ Klaus Schwab

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The love of money as a possession ... will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The crew were all of them inclined to cough and sneeze, the boys particularly, and Keynes said, "We ought put them all in the water: to keep the chest warm must be the foremost concern."
Laurence agreed without thinking and was shortly appalled by the sight of Emily bathing with the rest of the young officers, innocent of both clothing and modesty.
"You must not bathe with the others," Laurence said to her urgently, having bundled her out and into a blanket.
"Mustn't I?" she said, gazing up at him damp and bewildered.
"Oh, Christ," Laurence said, under his breath. "No," he told her firmly, "it is not suitable; you are beginning to be a young lady."
"Oh," she said dismissively, "Mother has told me all about that, but I have not started bleeding yet, and anyway I would not like to go to bed with any of them," and a thoroughly routed Laurence feebly fell back on giving her some make-work, and fled to Temeraire's side. ~ Naomi Novik

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

Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face". ~ Leonard Woolf

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. ~ John Maynard Keynes

I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women. ~ 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

We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance. ~ John Maynard Keynes

There was a pretext, albeit slender, that might have prompted Hayek to reach out to Keynes: Keynes had succeeded Edgeworth as editor of the Economic Journal in 1911. But ~ Nicholas Wapshott

In my opinion it is a grand book ... Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement ... What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States. ~ John Maynard Keynes

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom. ~ Henry Hazlitt

John Maynard Keynes essentially said, don't try and figure out what the market is doing. Figure out a business you understand, and concentrate. ~ Warren Buffett

I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case ~ John Maynard Keynes