“The duty of “saving” became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.”

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

The treasury could fill old bottles with banknotes and bury them, and leave it to private enterprises on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

This 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 long past the ocean is flat again.

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

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.

It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

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.

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Gold is a relic from a time when government’s were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.

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

Economics is a very dangerous science.

Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.

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.

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don’t agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.

But even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.

The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade.

And as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.