“But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.”

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.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

A speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

It is the long-term investor, who will in practice come in for the most criticism… For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional, and rash in the eyes of average opinion.