“By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.”

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.

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.

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget.

There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.

Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.