John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946)
British economist whose ideas, known as Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory and on many governments' fiscal policies.
He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
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 idea behind stamped money is sound.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
There was an attraction at first that Mr Baldwin should not be clever. But when he forever sentimentalises about his own stupidity, the charm is broken.
Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.
Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by the incompetent.
No one in our age was cleverer than Keynes nor made less attempt to conceal it.
The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Physics.
Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
It is better that a man should tyrannise 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.
The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.
There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.
I have sought with some touches of detail to bring out the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England, who have built up the foundations of our thought in the two and a half centuries, since Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote the first modern English book. I relate below the amazing progeny of Sir George Villiers. But the lineage of the High Intelligentsia is hardly less interbred and spiritually inter-mixed. Let the Villiers Connection fascinate the monarch or the mob and rule, or seem to rule, passing events. There is also a pride of sentiment to claim spiritual kinship with the Locke Connection and that long English line, intellectually and humanly linked with one another, to which the names in my second section belong. If not the wisest, yet the most truthful of men. If not the most personable, yet the queerest and sweetest. If not the most practical, yet of the purest public conscience. If not of high artistic genius, yet the most solid and sincere accomplishment within many of the fields which are ranged by the human mind.
It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.
Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul — religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient.
Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.