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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNESThe Economic Problem, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.
More John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you’re found out quickly.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Ideas shape the course of history.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of 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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES