John Maynard Keynes Quotes

The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.

To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party.

The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.

He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.

I seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasize that this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to recreate. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the bluff is discovered; the labouring classes may be no longer willing to forgo so largely, and the capitalist classes, no longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitate the hour of their confiscation.

In writing thus I do not necessarily disparage the practices of that generation. In the unconscious recesses of its being Society knew what it was about. The cake was really very small in proportion to the appetites of consumption, and no one, if it were shared all round, would be much the better off by the cutting of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of today but for the future security and improvement of the race,—in fact for "progress." If only the cake were not cut but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.

The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.

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 great events of man's history, in the unwinding of the complex fates of nations Justice is not so simple. And if it were, nations are not authorized, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers.

But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economic textbooks. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality of the opponent proposals - protectionism on one hand, and Marxian socialism on the other. Yet these doctrines are both characterised, not only or chiefly by their infringing the general presumption in favour of laissez-faire, but by mere logical fallacy. Both are examples of poor thinking, of inability to analyse a process and follow it out to its conclusion. The arguments against them, though reinforced by the principle of laissez-faire, do not strictly require it. Of the two, protectionism is at least plausible, and the forces making for its popularity are nothing to wonder at. But 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. At any rate, the obvious scientific deficiencies of these two schools greatly contributed to the prestige and authority of nineteenth-century laissez-faire.

The earth heaves and no one … is aware of the rumblings.

The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll

He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective
imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely foreordained,
the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the
riddle of health and of immortality. All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end,
uninterrupted, by himself, no one coming into the room, reading, copying, testing-all by himself, no
interruption for God's sake, no disclosure, no discordant breakings in or criticism, with fear and shrinking as
he assailed these half-ordained, half-forbidden things, creeping back into the bosom of the Godhead as into
his mother's womb. 'Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone', not as Charles Lamb 'a fellow who
believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle'.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

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.