- The 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 past the ocean is flat again.
- A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) Ch. 3; many have thought
this meant Keynes supported short terms gains against long term
economic performance, but he was actually criticizing the belief
that inflation would acceptably control itself without government
intervention.
- It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest,
be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock
Exchanges.
- Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 6, pg. 159
- The importance of money essentially flows from its being a link
between the present and the future.
- Book 5, Chapter 21, Section 1, pg.293
- 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.
- Book 6, Chapter 24, Section 1, pg.372
-
It is ideas, not vested interests, which
are dangerous for good or evil.
- Ch. 24 "Concluding Notes" pg.384
- Attributed
-
Ideas shape the
course of history.
- As quoted in
The Peter Plan: A
Proposal for
Survival (1976)
by
Laurence J. Peter,
p. 97
- They offer me neither food nor drink — intellectual nor spiritual
consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal;
it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated
to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have
already attained.
- On the Conservative Party; Skidelsky (1992:231) quoting Collected
Writings Volume IX page 296-297
- “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they
are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly
understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men,
who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
-
It is better to be roughly right than precisely
wrong”
-
- The great events of history are often due to
secular changes in the growth of population and
other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping
by their gradual character the notice of contemporary
observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen
or the fanaticism of atheists.
- Chapter II, Section I, pg.14-15
-
“Capitalism is the astounding belief that
the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the
greatest good of everyone.”
-
“Ideas shape the course of history.”
-
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing
new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
-
“Successful investing is anticipating the
anticipations of others.”
-
“Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible
into the indifferent by the incompetent”
-
“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.”<
-
“By a continuing process of inflation, government
can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth
of their citizens.”
-
“The best way to destroy the capitalist
system is 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.”
-
“The biggest problem is not to let
people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.”
-
“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational
investment policy in an irrational world”
-
“The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual
pursuit that still carries any reward.”
-
“I do not know which makes a man more
conservative to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past”
-
“In truth, the gold standard is already
a barbarous relic”
-
“The power of vested interests is vastly
exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas”
-
“But this long run is a misleading guide
to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
-
“If economists could manage to get themselves
thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that
would be splendid.”
-
“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.”
-
The social object of skilled investment
should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope
our future.”
-
“He [Clemenceau] had one illusion - France;
and one disillusion - mankind.”
-
“A study of the history of opinion is a
necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind”
-
“It is better that a man should tyrannize
over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens”
-
“Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser
when he was seated.”
-
“Regarded as a means, (the businessman)
is tolerable; as an end, he is not so satisfactory”
-
“Most men love money and security more,
and creation and construction less, as they get older”
-
“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.”
-
“The engine which drives enterprise is not
thrift, but profit”
-
“There is no harm in being
sometimes wrong- especially if one is promptly found out.”
-
“The importance of money flows from
it being a link between the present and the future.”
-
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they
are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.”
-
“It would not be foolish to contemplate
the possibility of a far greater progress still.”
-
“Nothing mattered except states of mind,
chiefly our own.”
-
“Americans are apt to be unduly interested
in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be...”
-
“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better
for the reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally”
-
“In the long run we are all dead.”
-
“It is better that a man should tyrannize
over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former
is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes
at least it is an alternative.”
-
“Words ought to be a little wild for they
are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.”
-
“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
propens”
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 exalted some of the most distasteful
of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We
shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its
true value. 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 recognised 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 ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet.
For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves
and to everyone 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. For only they can lead us
out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
"The Future", Essays in Persuasion
(1931) Ch. 5, JMK, CW, IX, pp.329 - 331, Economic Possibilities
for our Grandchildren (1930); as quoted in
"Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy
