Quotes from Richard Davenport-Hines

At present, Keynes said in 1926, everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Keynes preferred memoirs as 'more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel'.

In it he shifted from classical orthodoxy by denying the short-term efficacy of the quantity theory of money, while accepting its truth 'in the long run in which 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.'15

He detested the inefficiency of unregulated capitalism only less than he dreaded the waste and suffering of a proletarian revolution,' wrote Kingsley Martin, who edited the New Statesman when Keynes was chairman of its publishing company: 'he therefore made it his life's work to save capitalism by altering its nature.

I dare to speak for the much-abused so-called experts,' he told his fellow peers in a parliamentary debate. 'I even venture sometimes to prefer them, without intending any disrespect, to politicians. The common love of truth, bred of a scientific habit of mind, is the closest of bonds.

Under my tutelage you will be safe': the phrase is derived from 'me duce tutus eris' in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, with the literal meaning 'with me as a leader you will be safe'.

It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

He was wary of zealots who embraced good causes only to turn other people against them.61

Men like Crawford mistrusted Keynes because his views were unconfused. Throughout his life Keynes produced unimpeachable facts and figures, clear analyses, direct solutions and trenchant practical advice all based on the nitty-gritty of his subject, which were discounted by officials, politicians and bankers who dismissed him as academic, theoretical, quixotic, impractical. To them his clarity seemed too good to be true.

The painter and the dancer had similar sensibilities: they were responsive, instinctual, imaginative, sympathetic, astute and unstudied.

We are careless of that which is near us, and follow that which is afar off, to which we will travel and sail beyond the seas.

Although there is a human settlement at Jakobshavn, Greenland is an inhuman landscape of never-ending wastes.

He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it.

it was impossible to convey the complexities of an economic reform programme when voters only understood war-cries or catchphrases. He was more effective at talking sense into people, and in improving their comprehension

Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.

Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow, childish pleasures.

The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That's nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably 'mouching' until he dies, and then we say, "Oh, he must have been bad after all." --Charles Lightoller

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.

Our old ideas are not so much overthrown as upset. The old is not destroyed; it is replaced. We simply learn to see new things in a different light.

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things that should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.

It is not the miser who gets rich; but he who lays out his money in fruitful investments.

The treaty did not promote the economic rehabilitation of Europe, but created new frontiers that were charged with economic as well as political significance. These entailed trade barriers, confiscations of private property, prohibitions and passport controls.