John Maynard Keynes Quotes

• Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Capitalism, Extraordinary

• I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist today.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Worldly wisdom teaches us that it is better for the reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• We take it as a fundamental psychological rule of any modern community that, when its real income is increased, it will not increase its consumption by an equal absolute amount.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. 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.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I agree that our methods of control are unlikely to be sufficiently delicate or sufficiently powerful to maintain continuous full employment. I should be quite content with a reasonable approximation to it, and in practice I should probably relax my expansionist measures a little before technical full employment had actually been reached.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest… Experience does not show that individuals when they make up a social unit are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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 and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• England still stands outside Europe. Europe’s voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart, and England is not of her flesh and body.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Lenin was 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Champagne

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

  John Maynard Keynes

•  

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

   

  John Maynard Keynes

•  

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

   

  John Maynard Keynes

• 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

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

  John Maynard Keynes

•  

  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.

   

  John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes (42)

Birth:	5th June, 1883
Death:	21st April, 1946
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Economist

About

John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. He was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He was the founder of modern macroeconomics theory. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. In 1897, he won a scholarship to Eton College. He earned a BA degree in Mathematics from King's College, Cambridge University in 1904. By 1909 he had published his first professional economics article in the Economics Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. On being elected a fellow in 1911 he was made editor of The Economic Journal. He wrote several books include: Indian Currency and Finance, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, A Treatise on Probability, A Revision of the Treaty, A Treatise on Money, Essays in Persuasion, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and How to Pay for the War.

Related Authors

• Sylvia Ann Hewlett
• John Clapham
• Scott Nearing
• William Petty
• Benjamin Graham
• James Duesenberry
• Thomas Sowell
• Mario Draghi
• Dudley North
• Toshihiko Fukui

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 26th December

Births

• 1927 - Alan King
• 1956 - David Sedaris
• 1904 - Alejo Carpentier
• 1939 - Lynn Morley Martin
• 1820 - Dion Boucicault

Deaths

• 2011 - Samuel Carthorne Rivers
• 2005 - Kerry Packer
• 2004 - Reggie White
• 1930 - Kin Hubbard
• 1945 - Bela Bartok