John Maynard Keynes Quotes

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol – a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure inheart and cheerful of spirit.

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.

[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

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.

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

…By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract,… governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .

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.

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

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

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