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...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.
John Maynard KeynesShould government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.
John Maynard KeynesThey offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained.
John Maynard KeynesThe 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 KeynesI 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 KeynesThis siren, this goat-footed bard, this half human visitor to our age the hag-ridden and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity. One catches in his company that flavour of final purposelessness, inner responsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power.
John Maynard Keynes... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.
John Maynard KeynesThis long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
John Maynard KeynesThe old saying holds. Owe your banker �1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him �1 million and the position is reversed.
John Maynard KeynesIt is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.
John Maynard KeynesBy this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.
John Maynard KeynesIf the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
John Maynard KeynesIt 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 KeynesDangerous 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 KeynesInvestment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.
John Maynard KeynesHe had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.
John Maynard KeynesIt is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.
John Maynard KeynesThe 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 KeynesExperience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
John Maynard KeynesMost men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
John Maynard KeynesGalton'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 KeynesThere is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
John Maynard KeynesTo suppose that safety-first consists in having a small gamble in a large number of different companies where I have no information to reach a good judgment, as compared with a substantial stake in a company where one's information is adequate, strikes me as a travesty of investment policy.
John Maynard KeynesI see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.
John Maynard Keynes