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John Maynard Keynes

136 quotes

“I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Duncan Grant (15 December 1917)
“The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men will not always die quietly.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That she [France] has anything to fear from Germany in the future which we can foresee, except what she may herself provoke, is a delusion. When Germany has recovered her strength and pride, as in due time she will, many years must pass before she again casts her eyes Westwards. Germany's future now lies to the East, and it is in that direction her hopes and ambitions, when they revive, will certainly turn.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Revision of the Treaty (1922), p. 186
“The supporters of Monetary Reform, of which I... am a more convinced adherent than before, as the most important and significant measure Great Britain can take to increase economic welfare, must expound their arguments more fully... before they can overwhelm the forces of old custom and general ignorance... [F]luctuations of trade and employment... the greatest and the most remediable of the economic diseases of modern society... are mainly diseases of our credit and banking system...”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Return Towards Gold" The New Republic (Mar 18, 1925) Vol. XLII, No. 537, pp. 92-93
“The tendency of money to depreciate has been at times a weighty counterpoise against the cumulative results of compound interest and the inheritance of fortunes. It has been a loosening influence against the rigid distribution of old-won wealth and the separation of ownership from activity. By this means each generation can disinherit in part its predecessors' heirs; and the project of founding a perpetual fortune must be disappointed in this way, unless the community with conscious deliberation provides against it in some other way, more equitable and more expedient.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But 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.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ch. 4, p. 172”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive "natural liberty" in their economic activities. There is no "compact" conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must aim at separating those services which are technically social from those which are technically individual. The most important Agenda of the State relate not to those activities which private individuals are already fulfilling, but to those functions which fall outside the sphere of the individual, to those decisions which are made by no one if the State does not make them.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already... but to do those things which at present are not done at all.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is because particular individuals, fortunate in situation or in abilities, are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the Unemployment of Labour, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The time has... come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of Population... is most expedient.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but... in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no party in the world... pursuing right aims by right methods. Material Poverty provides the incentive to change... where there is very little margin for experiments. Material Prosperity removes the incentive just when it might be safe to take a chance.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The End of Laissez-faire" (1926); Full text online; Ch. 3
“There is... no so-called important political question so really unimportant, so irrelevant to the re-organization of the economic life of Great Britain, as the Nationalisation of the Railways.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world?”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the economic side I cannot perceive that Russian Communism has made any contribution to our economic problems of intellectual interest or scientific value. I do not think that it contains, or is likely to contain, any piece of useful economic technique which we could not apply, if we chose, with equal or greater success in a society which retained all the marks... of British bourgeois ideals.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Capitalism... is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often... a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers. Such a system has to be immensely, not merely moderately, successful to survive.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would maximise, economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, 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. ... For these strong reasons, therefore, I am inclined to the belief that...a greater measure of national self-sufficiency than existed in 1914 may tend to serve the cause of peace, rather than otherwise.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: National Self-Sufficiency", Finlay Lecture at University College Dublin (19 April 1933), quoted in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 21: Activities, 1931–1939: World Crises and Policies in Britain an…
“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. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: National Self-Sufficiency", Finlay Lecture at University College Dublin (19 April 1933), quoted in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 21: Activities, 1931–1939: World Crises and Policies in Britain an…
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: National self-sufficiency, New Statesman and Nation (15 July 1933)
“Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Cambridge Apostles of Cambridge University, in Essays in Biography (1933) Ch. 39; also later used in My Early Beliefs, a memoir he read to the Bloomsbury Group's Memoir Club in 1943.
“It seems to me that today's news about Germany cannot be taken too seriously. The hideous dilemma is presented – allowing them to call our bluff, and re-arm as and when they choose, with what results one can imagine, or the horror of a preventive war.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Kingsley Martin (15 November 1933), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), p. 255
“Marxists are ready to sacrifice the political liberties of individuals in order to change the existing economic order. So are Fascists and Nazis. That is why I said that those who had toyed with Marxist ideas could not have a clear conscience in defending the political liberties of individuals from reactionary attacks.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to the Editor of The New Statesman and Nation (11 August 1934)
“In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error; you can only convince him of it. And, even if you are right, you cannot convince him, if there is a defect in your own powers of persuasion and exposition or if his head is already so filled with contrary notions that he cannot catch the clues to your thought which you are trying to throw to him.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Drafts of chapters 8, and 9 of the draft of the General Theory for the summer of 1934. published in The General Theory and After. Part I: Preparation. Collected Writings vol. XIII (1973)
“Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx’s picture of the capitalist world… They look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 34
“Communism draws its strength from deeper, more serious sources. Offered to us as a means of improving the economic situation, it is an insult to our intelligence. But offered as a means of making the economic situation worse, that is its subtle, its almost irresistible, attraction. Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 35
“Being an optimist, I am still hopeful that it may end in the division of Spain geographically into two states. But, above all, I want the war to come to an end and not to extend.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Kingsley Martin on the Spanish Civil War (9 August 1937), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), p. 257
“Our sole and overriding purpose should be to make quite sure of countering the Fascist powers at long last. It is precisely because I believe the position to be critical and dangerous that I believe strategic retreats to be necessary and the gradual consolidation of forces absolutely essential.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Kingsley Martin (November 1937), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), p. 258
“the idea of wholesale shifts is for various reasons impracticable and indeed undesirable. Most of those who attempt to, sell too late and buy too late, and do both too often, incurring heavy expenses and developing too unsettled and speculative a state of mind, that, if it is widespread, has besides the grave social disadvantage of aggravating the scale of the fluctuations.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memorandum for the Estates Committee, King's College, Cambridge, 8 May 1938. Quoted in Charles D. Ellis, ed., "Classics. An Investor’s Anthology" (Homewood, Ill.: Business One Irwin in association with the Institute of …
“In a world war Hitler will be beaten and knows it. I agree with you that we should bluff to the hilt; and if the bluff is called, back out. I prefer, meanwhile, meiosis and bogus optimism in public.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Kingsley Martin during the Czech Crisis (26 August 1938), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), p. 267
“Please don't imagine that I have weakened on the wisdom of frontier revision. Indeed the latest concessions are such as to make one feel even more than before that in the long run frontier revision is a cleaner and safer remedy. I was simply trying to be emphatic about what you say yourself – that it is plain as pikestaff that at this juncture one must back up the Czechs, and particularly not suggest to Hitler that he can get what to him seems more.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Kingsley Martin during the Czech Crisis (11 September 1938), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), p. 270