John Maynard Keynes Quotes & Sayings

The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics. — John Maynard Keynes

Galton's eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics. — John Maynard Keynes

I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. — John Maynard Keynes

The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence. — John Maynard Keynes

The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry. — John Maynard Keynes

[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. — John Maynard Keynes

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others. — John Maynard Keynes

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be. — John Maynard Keynes

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

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

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? — John Maynard Keynes

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability. — John Maynard Keynes

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England. — John Maynard Keynes

I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable. — John Maynard Keynes

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer. — John Maynard Keynes

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own. — John Maynard Keynes

It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary. Moreover, the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward. — John Maynard Keynes

The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists . — John Maynard Keynes

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir? — John Maynard Keynes

Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance. — John Maynard Keynes

We will not have any more crashes in our time. — John Maynard Keynes

Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo ! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments. — John Maynard Keynes

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

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

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. — John Maynard Keynes

Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly. — John Maynard Keynes

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

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

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy. — John Maynard Keynes

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

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one. — John Maynard Keynes

[People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives. — John Maynard Keynes

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget. — John Maynard Keynes

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

Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed. — John Maynard Keynes

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

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 — John Maynard Keynes

The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always. — John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all. — John Maynard Keynes

Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that teach competitor has to pick not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees. — John Maynard Keynes

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

Nevertheless, if we contemplate a society with a somewhat stable wage-unit, with national characteristics which determine the propensity to consume and the preference for liquidity, and with a monetary system which rigidly links the quantity of money to the stock of the precious metals, it will be essential for the maintenance of prosperity that the authorities should pay close attention to the state of the balance of trade. For a favourable balance, provided it is not too large, will prove extremely stimulating; whilst an unfavourable balance may soon produce a state of persistent depression. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

Thus, after all, the actual rates of aggregate saving and spending do not depend on Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride or Avarice. Virtue and vice play no part. It all depends on how far the rate of interest is favourable to investment, after taking account of the marginal efficiency of capital. No, this is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, virtue would resume her sway;
the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume. Thus, once again, the tribute that classical economists pay to her is due to their concealed assumption that the rate of interest always is so governed. — John Maynard Keynes

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth
he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world
he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

Nothing can preserve the integrity of contact between individuals, except a discretionary authority in the state to revise what has become intolerable. The powers of uninterrupted usury are too great. If the accretions of vested interests were to grow without mitigation for many generations, half the population would be no better than slaves to the other half. — John Maynard Keynes

I wish I'd drunk more champagne. — John Maynard Keynes

It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time. — John Maynard Keynes

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines 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 the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing. — John Maynard Keynes

God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. — John Maynard Keynes

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth. — John Maynard Keynes

A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the mass psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield; since there will be no strong roots of conviction to hold it steady. — John Maynard Keynes

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. — John Maynard Keynes

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

I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

[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. — John Maynard Keynes

Men will not always die quietly. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. — John Maynard Keynes

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the 'financial' burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment. We have to accept them as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to 'enrich' an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live. — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

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? — John Maynard Keynes

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. — John Maynard Keynes

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. — John Maynard Keynes

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated. — John Maynard Keynes

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