Best 207 quotes of John Maynard Keynes on MyQuotes

The key to selecting the winner isn't choosing the face you think is the most beautiful but rather the face other people will pick

The love of money as a possession-as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life-will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease

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

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

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 future

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

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

The power to become habituated to his surroundings and therefore to no longer be grateful for what is good in it is a marked characteristic of mankind and needs to be fought against if a person is to be happy.

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

The principle objectives in life are love, the creation and enjoyment if aesthetic experience, the pursuit of knowledge. Love comes a long way first.

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

There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.

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

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

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.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.

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

[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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.

Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught

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.

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol - a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit.

To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.

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.

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.

Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?

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

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

When I find new information I change my mind; What do you do?

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

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

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues.

When the facts change, I change my mind.

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

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

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

--he, indeed, who gave fewest pledges to Fortune, has yet suffered her heaviest visitations.

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.

I only wish I had drunk more champagne.

I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.

It is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. ... in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.