27 Quotes by John Keynes
- There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
- Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
- Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
- The best way to destroy the capitalist system is 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.
- 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.
- The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
- 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.
- Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
- Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
- Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
- The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
- 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.
- By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
- Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
- Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
- 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.
- I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
- I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
- If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
- The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
- In the long run we are all dead.
- A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
- It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
- It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
- Ideas shape the course of history.
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