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John Maynard Keynes

136 quotes

“Courage will be forthcoming if tile leaders of opinion in all parties will summon out of tile fatigue and confusion of war enough lucidity of mind to understand for themselves and to explain to tile public what is required; and then propose a plan conceived in a spirit of social justice, a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice, not as an excuse for postponing desirable reforms, but as an opportunity for moving further than we have moved hitherto towards reducing in equalities.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the right outcome for this resultant of many separate policies. It depends on weighing one advantage against another. There is hardly a conceivable decision within the range of the supply services which does not affect it.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In peace time, that is to say, the size of the cake depends on the amount of work done. But in war time the size of the cake is fixed. If we work harder, we can fight better. But we must not consume more.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The general character of our solution must be, therefore, that it withdraws from expenditure a proportion of the increased earnings. This is the only way, apart from shortages of goods or higher prices, by which we can secure a balance between money to be spent and goods to be bought.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In order to calculate the size of the cake which will be left for civilian consumption, we have to estimate (1) the maximum current output that we are capable of organising from our resources of men and plant and materials, (2) how fast we can safely draw on our foreign reserves by importing more than we export, (3) how much of all this will be used up by our war effort.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nature of unemployment today is totally different from what it was a year ago. It is no longer caused by a deficiency of demand. There is no longer a potential surplus supply of the things we want. The transition to full employment is hindered by two obstacles. The first is due to the difficulty of shifting labour to the points where it is wanted. The second— and, for the time being, the chief—-obstacle is caused by the difficulties, other than the shortage of labour, in the way of existing demand becoming effective.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For each individual it is a great advantage to retain the rights over the fruits of his labour even though he must put off the enjoyment of them. His personal wealth is thus increased. For that is what wealth is,—command of the right to postponed consumption.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The appropriate time for the ultimate release of the deposits will have arrived at the onset of the first post-war slump.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mechanism of reaching equilibrium by means of a rising cost of living, which is vainly pursued by a rising level of wages, will be described in the next chapter. But it is admitted on all hands that this is the worst possible solution.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In writing thus I do not necessarily disparage the practices of that generation. In the unconscious recesses of its being Society knew what it was about. The cake was really very small in proportion to the appetites of consumption, and no one, if it were shared all round, would be much the better off by the cutting of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of today but for the future security and improvement of the race,—in fact for "progress." If only the cake were not cut but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasize that this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to recreate. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the bluff is discovered; the labouring classes may be no longer willing to forgo so largely, and the capitalist classes, no longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitate the hour of their confiscation.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between a view of the world termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth and that other view, militarist or rather diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture and hereditary or racial prejudice. To the good English radical, the latter is so unreal, so crazy in its combination of futility and evil, that he is often in danger of forgetting or disbelieving its actual existence.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: published in Manchester Guardian (1922); in Collected Writings, Volume 17, p. 370
“He was the nicest, and the only talented person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg … and Kurt Singer. And he was a Jew; and so was Fuerstenberg. And my dear Melchior is a Jew too. Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains. I vote rather for the plump hausfraus and thick fingered Wandering Birds. But I am not sure that I wouldn’t even rather be mixed up with Lloyd George than with the German political Jews.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes after a meeting with Albert Einstein in 1926, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 10, p. 383
“The power of taxation by currency depreciation is one which has been inherent in the State since Rome discovered it. The creation of legal-tender has been and is a Government’s ultimate reserve; and no State or Government is likely to decree its own bankruptcy or its own downfall, so long as this instrument still lies at hand unused. Besides this, […] the benefits of a depreciating currency are not restricted to the Government. Farmers and debtors and all persons liable to pay fixed money dues share in the advantage. As now in the persons of business men, so also in former ages these classes constituted the active and constructive elements in the economic scheme. Those secular changes, therefore, which in the past have depreciated money, assisted the new men and emancipated them from the dead hand; they benefited new wealth at the expense of old, and armed enterprise against accumulation.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a respectable and influential body of opinion which, repudiating with vehemence the adoption of either expedient, fulminates alike against Devaluations and Levies, on the ground that they infringe the untouchable sacredness of contract; or rather of vested interest, for an alteration of the legal tender and the imposition of a tax on property are neither of them in the least illegal or even contrary to precedent. Yet such persons, by overlooking one of the greatest of all social principles, namely the fundamental distinction between the right of the individual to repudiate contract and the right of the State to control vested interest, are the worst enemies of what they seek to preserve. For nothing can preserve the integrity of contract 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 interest were to grow without mitigation for many generations, half the population would be no better than slaves to the other half. Nor can the fact that in time of war it is easier for the State to borrow than to tax, be allowed permanently to enslave the tax-payer to the bond-holder. Those who insist that in these matters the State is in exactly the same position as the individual, will, if they have their way, render the continuance of an individualistic society, which depends for its existence on moderation. These conclusions might be deemed obvious if experience did not show that many conservative bankers regard it as more consonant with their cloth, and also as economising thought, to shift public discussion of financial topics off the logical on to an alleged "moral" plane, which means a realm of thought where vested interest can be triumphant over the common good without further debate. But it makes them unworthy guides in a perilous age of transition. The State must never neglect the importance of so acting in ordinary matters to promote certainty and security in business. But it makes them untrustworthy guides in a perilous age of transition. The State is a sovereign body of which the purpose is to promote the greatest good of the whole. When, therefore, we enter the realm of State action, everything is to be considered and weighed on its merits. Changes in Death Duties, Income Tax, Land Tenure, Licensing, Game Laws, Church Establishment, Feudal Rights, Slavery, and so on through all ages, have received the same denunciations from the absolutists of contract, who are the real parents of Revolution.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who advocate the return to a gold standard do not always appreciate along what different lines our actual practice has been drifting. If we restore the gold standard, are we to return also to the pre-war conceptions of bank-rate, allowing the tides of gold to play what tricks they like with the internal price-level, and abandoning the attempt to moderate the disastrous influence of the credit-cycle on the stability of prices and employment? Or are we to continue and develop the experimental innovations of our present policy, ignoring the "bank ration" and, if necessary, allowing unmoved a piling up of gold reserves far beyond our requirements or their depletion far below them? In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly here to trends further ahead. But if this is true of the best-informed, the vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgement, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Treatise on Money, Volume II (1930), pp. 360–61
“Free trade is profoundly based on the assumption of equilibrium conditions and in particular that wages always fall to their strict economic level. If they do not, and if for several reasons we do not desire them to, then it is only by means of a tariff that the ideal distribution of resources between different uses, which free trade aims at, can be achieved; and there is an unanswerable theoretical case for a countervailing import duty (and also for an export bounty) equivalent to the difference between the actual wage and the economic wage. ... I am no longer a free trader – and I believe that practically no-one else is – in the old sense of the term to the extent of believing in a very high degree of national specialisation and in abandoning any industry which is unable for the time being to hold its own. Where wages are immobile, this would be an extraordinarily dangerous doctrine to follow.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ramsay MacDonald (July 1930), quoted in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 20: Activities, 1929–1931: Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies, ed. D. Moggridge (1981), pp. 379–380
“I am interested to hear that some of their chief difficulties were with definitions. I am not at all surprised, though it is extraordinarily tiresome and boring that it should be so. In my book I have deemed it necessary to go into these matters at disproportionate length, whilst feeling that this was in a sense a great pity and might divert the readers' minds from the real issues. It is, I think, a further illustration of the appalling state of scholasticism into which the minds of so many economists have got which allow them to take leave of their intuitions altogether. Yet in writing economics one is not writing either a mathematical proof or a legal document. One is trying to arouse and appeal to the reader's intuitions; and, if he has worked himself into a state when he has none, one is helpless!”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to R. B. Bryce, 10 July 1935, published in The General Theory and After: A Supplement. Collected Writings vol. XXIX. (1979)
“The boys, who cannot grow up to adult human nature, are beating the prophets of the ancient race — Marx, Freud, Einstein — who have been tearing at our social, personal and intellectual roots, tearing with an objectivity which to the healthy animal seems morbid, depriving everything, as it seems, of the warmth of natural feeling. What traditional retort have the schoolboys but a kick in the pants? ... 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. Himself a schoolboy, too, but the other kind — with ruffled hair, soft hands and a violin. See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare... So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast — intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing? Yet Albert and the blond beast make up the world between them. If either cast the other out, life is diminished in its force. When the barbarians destroy the ancient race as witches, when they refuse to scale heaven on broomsticks, they may be dooming themselves to sink back into the clods which bore them.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Statesman and Nation, 21 October 1933, published in Collected Writings volume xxviii pages 21-22
“There is a time for helpless acquiescence and a time for action. But to-day is it not the duty of the United States and of the British Empire and the other 23 nations to warn Japan that they will sever all trade relations with her unless she mends her ways, with an undertaking of mutual assistance against any reprisals on her part? There are at least nine chances in 10 that such a threat would be effective; and its success would have great value for the future as well as for the present. If the United States were to decline our proposal, we could not help it. But we cannot escape blame unless we take some initiative towards positive action.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to The Times (29 September 1937), p. 13
“Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which are transitory or fluctuating so as to develop a logical way of thinking about the latter, and of understanding the time sequences to which they give rise in particular cases. Good economists are scarce because the gift for using "vigilant observation" to choose good models, although it does not require a highly specialised intellectual technique, appears to be a very rare one.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Roy Harrod (4 July 1938), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XIV (1971), p. 297
“We have suffered one of the worst pieces of trickery in history. Honourable international policy has suffered a terrific reverse by the unscrupulous intrigues, quite unsupported by public opinion, of our own pro-Nazis. ... It is not certain that the present settlement may not be a good thing in the long run. Viewed quite drily, there is a great deal to be said for it. Hitler's next move is not very obvious or easy. ... The settlement itself cannot be rightly denounced as indefensible and monstrous. What is certain is something rather different – namely that the sympathies and methods which have brought it about cannot be safely allowed to continue in charge.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Kingsley Martin on the Munich Agreement (1 October 1938), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), pp. 271-272
“During the lengthy process of production the business world is incurring outgoings in terms of money-paying out in money for wages and other expenses of production-in the expectation of recouping this outlay by disposing of the product for money at a later date. That is to say, the business world as a whole must always be in a position where it stands to gain by a rise of price and to lose by a fall of price. Whether it likes it or not, the technique of production under a regime of money-contract forces the business world always to carry a big speculative position; and if it is reluctant to carry this position, the productive process must be slackened.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Social Consequences of Changes in The Value of Money" (1923)
“This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life … and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Great Slump of 1930" (1930); appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum (1930) ; Referring to economics and the Great Depression
“Why should coal miners suffer a lower standard of life than other classes of labour? They may be lazy, good-for-nothing fellows who do not work so hard or so long as they should. But is there any evidence that they are more lazy or more good-for-nothing than other people? On grounds of social justice, no case can be made out for reducing. the wages of the miners. They are the victims of the economic Juggernaut. They represent in the flesh the "fundamental adjustments" engineered by the Treasury and the Bank of England to satisfy the impatience of the City fathers to bridge the "moderate gap" between $4.40 and $4.86. They (and others to follow) are the "moderate sacrifice" still necessary to ensure the stability of the gold standard. The plight of the coal miners is the first, but not—unless we are very lucky—the last, of the Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill" (1925)
“Ought I, then, to join the Labour Party? ...To begin with, it is a class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue my own. When it comes to the class struggle, my local and personal patriotisms... are attached to my own surroundings. I can be influenced by what seems to me to be Justice and good sense; but the Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie. But, above all, I do not believe that the intellectual elements in the Labour Party will ever exercise adequate control; too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about; and if—which is not unlikely—the control of the party is seized by an autocratic inner ring, this control will be exercised in the interests of the extreme Left Wing—the section of the Labour Party which I shall designate the Party of Catastrophe.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Am I a Liberal?" (1925)
“I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930), in Essays in Persuasion, W. W. Norton, 1963, p. 371; as quoted by Joan Robinson, "Freedom and Necessity" (1970), p. 117.
“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 exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. 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 recognised 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 … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone 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. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930); appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum (1930); as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy
“I have sought with some touches of detail to bring out the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England, who have built up the foundations of our thought in the two and a half centuries, since Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote the first modern English book. I relate below the amazing progeny of Sir George Villiers. But the lineage of the High Intelligentsia is hardly less interbred and spiritually inter-mixed. Let the Villiers Connection fascinate the monarch or the mob and rule, or seem to rule, passing events. There is also a pride of sentiment to claim spiritual kinship with the Locke Connection and that long English line, intellectually and humanly linked with one another, to which the names in my second section belong. If not the wisest, yet the most truthful of men. If not the most personable, yet the queerest and sweetest. If not the most practical, yet of the purest public conscience. If not of high artistic genius, yet the most solid and sincere accomplishment within many of the fields which are ranged by the human mind.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that 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 of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician. Much, but not all, of this many-sidedness Marshall possessed. But chiefly his mixed training and divided nature furnished him with the most essential and fundamental of the economist's necessary gifts – he was conspicuously historian and mathematician, a dealer in the particular and the general, the temporal and the eternal, at the same time.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Alfred Marshall", p. 170; as cited in: Donald Moggridge (2002), Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, p. 424; Originally published in The Economic Journal, September 1924
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. 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. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for 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. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have now reached a stage in the argument where I have to choose between being too definite or being too vague. If I set forth a concrete proposal in all its particulars, I expose myself to a hundred criticisms on points not essential to the principle of the plan. If I go further in the use of figures for illustration, I am involved more and more in guess-work; and I run the risk of getting the reader bogged in details which may be inaccurate and could certainly be amended without injury to the main fabric. Yet if I restrict myself to generalities, I do not give the reader enough to bite on; and am in fact shirking the issue, since the size, the order of magnitude, of the factors involved is not an irrelevant detail.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the Trade Unions such a scheme as this offers great and evident advantages compared with progressive inflation or with a wages tax. In spite of the demands of war, the workers would have secured the enjoyment, sooner or later, of a consumption fully commensurate with their increased effort; whilst family allowances and the cheap ration would actually improve, even during the war, the economic position of the poorer families. We should have succeeded in making the war an opportunity for a positive social improvement. How great a benefit in comparison with a futile attempt to evade a reasonable share of the burden of a just war, ending in a progressive inflation!”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source