Top 218 Quotes & Sayings by John Maynard Keynes

In the long run we are all dead.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

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

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

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

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

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

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

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

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

When the facts change, I change my mind.

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.

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

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

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.

The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.

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

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.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

... 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.

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

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . 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 can diagnose.

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

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.

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.