we make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.

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

But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.

A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.

There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.