John Maynard Keynes
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.Collection: Finance
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.Collection: Religion
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.Collection: Education
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.Collection: Money
In the long run we are all dead.Collection: Death
Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.Collection: Money
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.Collection: Good
Ideas shape the course of history.Collection: History
I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Success
By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.Collection: Government
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.Collection: History
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
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.
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
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.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.Collection: Peace
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.Collection: Inspirational
When the facts change, I change my mind.Collection: Business
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.Collection: Justice
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.Collection: Insightful
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.Collection: Money
The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.Collection: Animal
The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.Collection: Ideas
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 backCollection: Believe
The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.Collection: Investing
If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.Collection: Bankers
The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.Collection: Slumps
The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the futureCollection: Past
When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-doneCollection: Country
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.Collection: Investing
The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.Collection: Government
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.Collection: Income
Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.Collection: Business
Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.Collection: Doubt
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly 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 can diagnose.Collection: Mean
This siren, this goat-footed bard, this half human visitor to our age the hag-ridden and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity. One catches in his company that flavour of final purposelessness, inner responsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power.Collection: Responsibility
They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained.Collection: Spiritual
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.Collection: Writing