John Maynard Keynes Quotes - Page 4

Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

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.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.

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

In the long run we are all dead.

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.

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

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

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged

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.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.

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

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

I wish I'd drunk more champagne.

As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.

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 labour, 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.

Canada is a place of infinite promise. We like the people, and if one ever had to emigrate, this would be the destination, not the U.S.A. The hills, lakes and forests make it a place of peace and repose of the mind, such as one never finds in the U.S.A.