John maynard keynes quotes

It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.

If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.

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

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back

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

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

There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.

So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against (Einstein). He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing?

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

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

Ideas shape the course of history.

In a regime of Free Trade and free economic intercourse it would be of little consequence that iron lay on one side of a political frontier, and labour, coal, and blast furnaces on the other. But as it is, men have devised ways to impoverish themselves and one another; and prefer collective animosities to individual happiness.

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

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

Galton's eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine of that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of 'liquid' securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.

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

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.

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

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol - a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit.

It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.

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.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.

When the facts change, I change my mind.

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

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

I wish I'd drunk more champagne.

Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the future

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.

I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.

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.

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

Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.

I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable.

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

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.

It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you're found out quickly.

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

The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.

In the long run we are all dead.

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

The love of money as a possession...will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

It's not bringing in the new ideas that's so hard; it's getting rid of the old ones.

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes. It is a mistake to think that one limits one's risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence. . . . One's knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

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

A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the mass psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield; since there will be no strong roots of conviction to hold it steady.

If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

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.

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?

The key to selecting the winner isn't choosing the face you think is the most beautiful but rather the face other people will pick

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

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

Canada is a place of infinite promise. We like the people, and if one ever had to emigrate, this would be the destination, not the U.S.A. The hills, lakes and forests make it a place of peace and repose of the mind, such as one never finds in the U.S.A.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

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.

... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold (or, formerly, silver) standard.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. 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 can diagnose.

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.

This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run 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.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.

Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues.

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

Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.

If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.

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

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

The power to become habituated to his surroundings and therefore to no longer be grateful for what is good in it is a marked characteristic of mankind and needs to be fought against if a person is to be happy.

The love of money as a possession-as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life-will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease

Economics is a very dangerous science.

The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.

The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.

The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.

One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.

It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.

By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.

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

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.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.

Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.