“I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.”

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.

The idea behind stamped money is sound.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

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.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.

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.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future .

When the facts change, I change my mind.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.

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 right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.

I’m no communist. I’m a tax cutting Conservative. But I want a capitalism that is fairer to forgotten people.

The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative.

I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.

When Cameron’s Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.

In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can’t turn the clock back to 1904, what’s the point of being a Conservative?

Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.

Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.

The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic.