“It’s not bringing in the new ideas that’s so hard; it’s getting rid of the old ones.”

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.

Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.

Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

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.

I’m trying as hard as I can to act like I’m 65, but it’s very difficult.

You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.

My problem is that I think everybody needs to work as hard as I worked when I was in my prime.

TV is a hard job. You work 15 hours a day. People tell you what to do. I hate to do it.

It’s just very hard to teach a class of students about what has happened in the Global Financial Crisis.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

Any top-level athlete, it’s always the same. There’s always that hint of arrogance there… It’s hard to be humble when you’re the best.

That Beatle euphoria has always been there, and it’s hard to be in a room with a Beatle and try to be totally natural. You never shake that off.