Top 160 John Maynard Keynes Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.”

— John Maynard Keynes

52. “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

53. “It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.”

— John Maynard Keynes

54. “In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.”

— John Maynard Keynes

55. “Men will not always die quietly.”

— John Maynard Keynes

56. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

57. “It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you’re found out quickly.”

— John Maynard Keynes

58. “It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.”

— John Maynard Keynes

59. “Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.”

— John Maynard Keynes

60. “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

— John Maynard Keynes

61. “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?”

— John Maynard Keynes

62. “If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.”

— John Maynard Keynes

63. “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

64. “A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”

— John Maynard Keynes

65. “I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable.”

— John Maynard Keynes

66. “What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man was that age which came to an end in August 1914.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

68. “Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides.”

— John Maynard Keynes

69. “There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.”

— John Maynard Keynes

70. “The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.”

— John Maynard Keynes

71. “I only wish I had drunk more champagne.”

— John Maynard Keynes

72. “If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.”

— John Maynard Keynes

73. “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

74. “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

75. “Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.”

— John Maynard Keynes

76. “The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, – but generally to be obtained at your neighbor’s expense.”

— John Maynard Keynes

77. “The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.”

— John Maynard Keynes

78. “The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.”

— John Maynard Keynes

79. “If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism.”

— John Maynard Keynes

80. “Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.”

— John Maynard Keynes

81. “Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.”

— John Maynard Keynes

82. “An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.”

— John Maynard Keynes

83. “The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.”

— John Maynard Keynes

84. “The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.”

— John Maynard Keynes

85. “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

86. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

88. “It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.”

— John Maynard Keynes

89. “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”

— John Maynard Keynes

90. “The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.”

— John Maynard Keynes

91. “Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.”

— John Maynard Keynes

92. “Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.”

— John Maynard Keynes

93. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

95. “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.”

— John Maynard Keynes

96. “There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.”

— John Maynard Keynes

97. “The insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men...”

— John Maynard Keynes

98. “It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.”

— John Maynard Keynes

99. “Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes