Quotes from John Maynard Keynes

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

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 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.

In the long run we are all dead.

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

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

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.

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.

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?

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

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

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

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

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

Canada is a place of infinite promise. We like the people, and if one ever had to emigrate, this would be the destination, not the U.S.A. The hills, lakes and forests make it a place of peace and repose of the mind, such as one never finds in the U.S.A.

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

If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours.

He [Clemenceau] had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind.

The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

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

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.

The engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit.