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Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

John Maynard Keynes

One’s knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Confidence Enterprise Experience Knowledge Personal
The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Envelope Future Ignorance Object Ourselves Skills Social
Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Advance Experience Provision
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Believe Economy Intellectual Man Myself Practice Quite Slave
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Avoid Bank Blame Dangerous Himself Ruin Sound
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Ideas Origin Party Politics
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Change Farm Raining Season Stock Summer
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Essence Investor Opinion Practice Willing
Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Information Myself Position Thinking Yourself
When the facts change, I change my mind.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Change Fact Inspirational Mindset Myself Open
The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Drive Profit Thrift
The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Acceptance Big Forget Ideas Old People Problem
The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Crowd Division Employment Nation Provide Spoil
It is Enterprise which build and improves the world’s possessions. If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Build Enterprise Improve Possession Sleep Thrift Wealth World
I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Believe Future Learning Myself
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Bank Known Myself People Understand University
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Easy Economist Ideas Politics Rule World
It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Foolish Greatness Possible Progress
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Aware Himself Investor Risk Run
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Bank Problem Wealth Yourself
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Delusion Forget Goodness Suffering
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Behavior Creation Economics Head Heart Problem Religion
It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Confidence Limitation Mistake Reason Special Thinking
Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Agreement Move Philosophy Virtual
I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Ideas Interest Myself Power
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Currency Existence Subtle Sure
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.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Conclusion Drawing Economics Mindset Technique

Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

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Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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