It's a terrible thing to be a worker exploited in the capitalist system. The only worse thing is to be a worker unable to find anyone to exploit you.

The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.

The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.

When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.

In general, the nightmare quality of Marx's thought gives it, in this bedevilled age, an air of greater reality than the gentle complacency of the orthodox academics. Yet he, at the same time, is more encouraging than they, for he releases hope as well as terror from Pandora's box, while they preach only the gloomy doctrine that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

The very nature of economics is rooted in nationalism. ... It [was] developed ... in the hope of throwing light upon questions of policy. But policy means nothing unless there is an authority to carry it out, and authorities are national.