Explore Quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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

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.

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.

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

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.

The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available,with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation in the United States.

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

Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught

The old saying holds. Owe your banker �1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him �1 million and the position is reversed.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

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

The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.

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.

The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems.