“The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

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

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.

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

Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

Chess is a cure for headaches.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

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

I’m saying the excessive focus on what gender a person is, rather than what they do, does a disservice to women.

Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue.

We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.

Sometimes I take a while to get ready to go out. It’s not excessive, but it takes me some time to find clean clothes that match.

Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

The best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind.