Quotes from John Maynard Keynes

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

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

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

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

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

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

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

Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.

When the facts change, I change my mind.

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

The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.

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

Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

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

Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

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