“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.”

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.

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.

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

Our mission, as set forth by the Congress is a critical one: to preserve price stability, to foster maximum sustainable growth in output and employment, and to promote a stable and efficient financial system that serves all Americans well and fairly.

Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen.

The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.

And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.

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.

So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.

During the period of capital moving from one employment to another, the profits on that to which capital is flowing will be relatively high, but will continue so no longer than till the requisite capital is obtained.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged.