Top 160 John Maynard Keynes Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.”

— John Maynard Keynes

102. “But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future .”

— John Maynard Keynes

103. “I can’t remember my telephone number, but I know it was in the high numbers.”

— John Maynard Keynes

104. “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

105. “He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.”

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

107. “I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.”

— John Maynard Keynes

108. “If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.”

— John Maynard Keynes

109. “The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.”

— John Maynard Keynes

110. “Chess is a cure for headaches.”

— John Maynard Keynes

111. “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

112. “I should have drunk more Champagne.”

— John Maynard Keynes

113. “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.”

— John Maynard Keynes

114. “When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.”

— John Maynard Keynes

115. “I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .”

— John Maynard Keynes

116. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

— John Maynard Keynes

117. “Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.”

— John Maynard Keynes

118. “Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.”

— John Maynard Keynes

119. “Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.”

— John Maynard Keynes

120. “God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.”

— John Maynard Keynes

121. “If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy.”

— John Maynard Keynes

122. “The principle objectives in life are love, the creation and enjoyment if aesthetic experience, the pursuit of knowledge. Love comes a long way first.”

— John Maynard Keynes

123. “If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.”

— John Maynard Keynes

124. “It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.”

— John Maynard Keynes

125. “I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.”

— John Maynard Keynes

126. “The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.”

— John Maynard Keynes

127. “Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization.”

— John Maynard Keynes

128. “In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.”

— John Maynard Keynes

129. “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

130. “The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.”

— John Maynard Keynes

131. “The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.”

— John Maynard Keynes

132. “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize – not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years – the way the world thinks about economic problems.”

— John Maynard Keynes

133. “Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.”

— John Maynard Keynes

134. “Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.”

— John Maynard Keynes

135. “The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .”

— John Maynard Keynes

136. “Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.”

— John Maynard Keynes

137. “How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?”

— John Maynard Keynes

138. “I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.”

— John Maynard Keynes

139. “Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.”

— John Maynard Keynes

140. “One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.”

— John Maynard Keynes

141. “I am trying to re-shape and improve my central position.”

— John Maynard Keynes

142. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

143. “The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.”

— John Maynard Keynes

144. “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.”

— John Maynard Keynes

145. “Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.”

— John Maynard Keynes

146. “I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.”

— John Maynard Keynes

147. “Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo ! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.”

— John Maynard Keynes

148. “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.”

— John Maynard Keynes

149. “To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.”

— John Maynard Keynes

150. “It is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians.”

— John Maynard Keynes