Quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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 influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.

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

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

Too large a proportion of recent mathematical economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

In the long run we are all dead.

We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

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

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.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

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.

Ideas shape the course of history.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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