John Maynard Keynes Quotes - Page 8

The treasury could fill old bottles with banknotes and bury them..and leave it to private enterprises on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.

Chess is a cure for headaches.

To suppose that safety-first consists in having a small gamble in a large number of different companies where I have no information to reach a good judgment, as compared with a substantial stake in a company where one's information is adequate, strikes me as a travesty of investment policy.

The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.

Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results.

How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?

Men will not always die quietly.

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

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.

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

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

Thus those reformers, who look for a remedy by creating artificial carrying-costs for the money through the device of requiring legal-tender currency to be periodically stamped at a prescribed cost in order to retain its quality as money, or in analogous ways, have been on the right track; and the practical value of their proposals deserves consideration.

The idea behind stamped money is sound.

It is impossible that the intention of the entrepreneur who has borrowed in order to increase investment can become effective (except in substitution for investment by other entrepreneurs which would have occurred otherwise) at a faster rate than the public decide to increase their savings

I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.

I do not mean to impugn the social justice and social expediency of the redistribution of incomes aimed at by N.I.R.A. and by the various schemes for agricultural restriction. The latter, in particular, I should strongly support in principle. But too much emphasis on the remedial value of a higher price-level as an object in itself may lead to serious misapprehension as to the part which prices can play in the technique of recovery. The stimulation of output by increasing aggregate purchasing power is the right way to get prices up; and not the other way round.

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

I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems.

I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.

[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.

...By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract,... governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.

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.

[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.