John Maynard Keynes Quotes

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

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

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

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

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

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

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

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

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

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you're found out quickly.

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

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.

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

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.

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.

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

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.

The Economic Problem...the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.

Chess is a cure for headaches.

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.

There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.

It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.

It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.

Economics is a very dangerous science.

I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion.

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

But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?

Men will not always die quietly.

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

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold (or, formerly, silver) standard.

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

I should have drunk more Champagne.

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

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

I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.