John Maynard Keynes Quotes - Page 3

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.

By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

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

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

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.

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.

Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case

It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.

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

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

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

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.

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

It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

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

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

It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you're found out quickly.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

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

It's not bringing in the new ideas that's so hard; it's getting rid of the old ones.

Economics is a very dangerous science.

This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.