Top 160 John Maynard Keynes Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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2. “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

— John Maynard Keynes

Featured in: Investing Quotes

3. “In the long run we are all dead.”

— John Maynard Keynes

4. “Economics is a very dangerous science.”

— John Maynard Keynes

5. “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

— John Maynard Keynes

6. “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

— John Maynard Keynes

7. “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

— John Maynard Keynes

8. “Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”

— John Maynard Keynes

9. “The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.”

— John Maynard Keynes

10. “The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.”

— John Maynard Keynes

11. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

12. “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

14. “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

15. “The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.”

— John Maynard Keynes

16. “Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.”

— John Maynard Keynes

17. “Ideas shape the course of history.”

— John Maynard Keynes

18. “By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

— John Maynard Keynes

19. “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

20. “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”

— John Maynard Keynes

21. “The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.”

— John Maynard Keynes

22. “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

— John Maynard Keynes

23. “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

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

— John Maynard Keynes

25. “When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

27. “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

28. “Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.”

— John Maynard Keynes

29. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

30. “It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.”

— John Maynard Keynes

31. “Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?”

— John Maynard Keynes

32. “If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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33. “Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

35. “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.”

— John Maynard Keynes

36. “The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.”

— John Maynard Keynes

37. “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

— John Maynard Keynes

38. “Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

41. “The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.”

— John Maynard Keynes

42. “All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.”

— John Maynard Keynes

43. “The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.”

— John Maynard Keynes

44. “We will not have any more crashes in our time.”

— John Maynard Keynes

45. “I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.”

— John Maynard Keynes

46. “To suppose that safety-first consists in having a small gamble in a large number of different companies where I have no information to reach a good judgment, as compared with a substantial stake in a company where one’s information is adequate, strikes me as a travesty of investment policy.”

— John Maynard Keynes

47. “Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.”

— John Maynard Keynes

48. “Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.”

— John Maynard Keynes

49. “It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

— John Maynard Keynes

50. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes