John Maynard Keynes Quotes

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

If the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds.

The same rule of self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the un-appropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.

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

Once we allow ourselves to become disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case — except in war conditions

Like the monetarist Milton Friedman, Keynes looked to price stability as a way to shore up classical economic thinking. For the most part, he believed, laissez-faire economics worked. Supply and demand did bring society to a prosperous equilibrium. They just needed a few pieces of basic economic architecture to work: property rights, the rule of law, and price stability. But unlike Friedman, Keynes had arrived at monetarism as a creative way to expand the power of the state to fight the uncertainties and anxieties of postwar life.

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.

If .. spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.

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

El día en que la abundancia de capital interfiera con la de producción puede aplazarse en la medida en que los millonarios encuentren satisfacción en edificar poderosas mansiones para encerrarse en ellas mientras vivan y pirámides para albergarse después de muertos, o, arrepintiéndose de sus pecados levanten catedrales y funden monasterios o misiones en el extranjero.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others

Obviously consumption-goods, taken as a whole, have in this sense the longest period of production, since of every productive process they constitute the last stage. Thus if the first impulse towards the increase in effective demand comes from an increase in consumption, the initial elasticity of employment will be further below its eventual equilibrium-level than if the impulse comes from an increase in investment. Moreover,

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.