John Maynard Keynes Quotes

I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that teach competitor has to pick not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

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

Ideje ekonomista i političkih filozofa, i kad su u pravu i kad nisu, imajući veći uticaj nego što se obično smatra. U stvari, svetom malo šta drugo vlada. Praktični ljudi, koji smatraju da ne podležu intelektualnim uticajima, obično su robovi nekog preminulog ekonomiste. Ludaci na vlasti, koji čuju glasove oko sebe, mogu da zahvale za svoje ludilo nekom akademskom skribomanu od pre nekoliko godina.

The mechanism of reaching equilibrium by means of a rising cost of living, which is vainly pursued by a rising level of wages, will be described in the next chapter. But it is admitted on all hands that this is the worst possible solution.

A ‘sound’ banker, alas, is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

Spirit of the Years

Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry
By the Immanent Unrecking. Nought remains
But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage.

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

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

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.

Wage flexibility may not cure an ailing economy, but simply make the rich richer and the poor poorer; you get an economy driven not by wages, but by assets and if those assets stay in the same hands, there is no dynamism and social mobility.

If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.

The phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus. Even the idea is not present in a dogmatic form in any of these authors. Adam Smith, of course, was a Free Trader and an opponent of many eighteenth-century restrictions on trade. But his attitude towards the Navigation Acts and the usury laws shows that he was not dogmatic. Even his famous passage about 'the invisible hand' reflects the philosophy which we associate with Paley rather than the economic dogma of laissez-faire.

In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error; you can only convince him of it. And, even if you are right, you cannot convince him, if there is a defect in your own powers of persuasion and exposition or if his head is already so filled with contrary notions that he cannot catch the clues to your thought which you are trying to throw to him.