John Maynard Keynes Quotes

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

When the facts change, I change my mind.

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 back

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

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.

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.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.

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

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

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

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

It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.

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

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

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

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

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

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

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

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.

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.

Ideas shape the course of history.

As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in 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. It is a mistake to think that one limits one's risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence. . . . One's knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.

In the long run we are all dead.

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

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

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.

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.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.

One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.

... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

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.

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.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.