John Maynard Keynes Quotes and Quotation

• I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
  • Letter to Duncan Grant (15 December 1917)

• 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.
  • Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

• Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.
  • The End of Laissez-faire (1926)

• Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion— how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.
  • The End of Laissez-faire (1926)

• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
  • Preface to The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)
  • Variant: The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.    

• I should have drunk more Champagne.
  • Last words.

Attributed:

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

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

• 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.

• Ideas shape the course of history. 

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

• In the long run, we're all dead.

• In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.  

• It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.

• It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

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

• Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of their soul— religion and business.    

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

• Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

• Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

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

• 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 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 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.

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

• 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.

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

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